Some coronavirus news

Some coronavirus news. Good news and bad news.

Bad news first.

As many people know, two prestigious medical journals, the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, both had to retract published papers recently. In fact, it's become a scandal.

The Lancet retracted a hydroxychloroquine study, while the NEJM retracted a cardiovascular disease study. The main issue is data integrity; data may have been compromised. Originally data was provided by a company named Surgisphere, but a co-author of both papers co-founded Surgisphere, i.e., Sapan S. Desai, MD, PhD, and Desai's publications history is rife with research misconduct.

Also on the hydroxychloroquine front, a separate study - likewise published in the NEJM but which did not use the Surgisphere database - found that hydroxychloroquine was not significantly different from placebo:

We enrolled 821 asymptomatic participants. Overall, 87.6% of the participants (719 of 821) reported a high-risk exposure to a confirmed Covid-19 contact. The incidence of new illness compatible with Covid-19 did not differ significantly between participants receiving hydroxychloroquine (49 of 414 [11.8%]) and those receiving placebo (58 of 407 [14.3%]); the absolute difference was −2.4 percentage points (95% confidence interval, −7.0 to 2.2; P=0.35). Side effects were more common with hydroxychloroquine than with placebo (40.1% vs. 16.8%), but no serious adverse reactions were reported.

Now for the good news.

There are still many ongoing studies and trials. Such as one on convalescent plasma which was found to be both safe as well as effective in 19 of 25 (76%) severely ill COVID-19 patients.

In addition, there are several very promising vaccines trials under way. Several in phase 1 trials, a few in phase 2, and a couple moving to phase 3 trials. This includes the much touted vaccine from Moderna which is set to begin phase 3 trials as early as next month in July. The Regulatory Affairs and Professionals Society (RAPS) looks like a good website to track vaccine candidates.

Reeducation camps

In the past, some right-wingers have predicted a dystopian future in which tens of millions of Americans are sent to reeducation camps. The reality is less dramatic: we've had reeducation camps for decades: public schools, state universities, private secular universities, and "progressive Christian" private colleges. 

Dembski interview

https://billdembski.com/interview/bill-dembski-interview/#more-54391

Curved grading

I have a beef about traditional grading. Let's use seminary as an example. Take comprehensive exams. Professors don't expect students to get 100%. Few students get a perfect score. 

Yet that means they don't expect students to remember everything they were taught. But what's the objective of teaching? The objective is not to pass the test, but to master the material. If, however, there's too much material to remember, then students aren't learning what you're teaching. But why teach more than they can learn? Why teach more than they can remember? Shouldn't mastery be the goal?

Consider an exam on internal anatomy, in which a med student scores 90%. Say that's a passing grade. 

Say that means he can identify 90% of your internal organs. It's the other 10% he's confused about. Would you undergo an operation by a surgeon who could identify 90% of your internal organs? What about the pesky 10%? Is that a kidney or the spleen? Flip a coin?

Someone might object that surgical knowledge is a life and death affair, so there's not the same margin for error. But does that mean seminaries teach students lots of irrelevant stuff? 

A better approach might be short, weekly quizzes. Passage requires a perfect score, but they can retake the quiz until they get 100%. At least that way they know it all. They mastered all the material. They remembered what they were taught. They may forget some of that at a later date, but that's better then never knowing it in the first place. 

Then there's the tradition of grading on a curve. That's unfair for two reasons.

To begin with, curved grading is, in effect, a group grade. You're not being graded on the quality of your own performance. Rather, your grade is dependent on how all the other students performed, even though you have no control over their performance. 

But it gets worse. Some students cheat. And that raises the bar for the honest students, since curved grading averages the grades. If students weren't graded on a curve, then each student's grade would be independent of the others. But if some students cheat, that raises the bar for the other students by distorting the curve. Honest students are downgraded by the cheaters. Honest students get a lower grade than they'd otherwise get because they're competing with students who take unfair advantage. 

I don't speak as a disgruntled student. I was a high-performing student in college and seminary. I'm speaking on behalf of other students. 

too broke to be woke

https://quillette.com/2018/09/14/social-justice-in-the-shadows/

Ivy League racism

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-office-of-institutional_21.html

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-office-of-institutional.html

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination-lawsuit-data.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html

A Response To Anita Gregory's Doctoral Thesis On Enfield

Abbreviations

JSPR = Journal of the Society for Psychical Research

SPR = Society for Psychical Research

THIH = Guy Playfair, This House Is Haunted (United States: White Crow Books, 2011)

For the background to this post and an explanation of why her thesis is important, see here. You can download the thesis here after registering with the site. I'll be responding to her thesis in hyphenated sections. If you aren't interested in the topic covered in one section, you can move on to another by following the hyphens. You can also use the Ctrl F feature on your keyboard to find what you're looking for.

Anita Gregory's Enfield Poltergeist Doctoral Thesis Available Online For Free

To learn more about the significance of this, go to my article here and do a Ctrl F search for "thesis". Read, especially, from the second use of the term onward.

To get Gregory's thesis, go here and register with the site, which doesn't take long and is free. I haven't yet found anybody discussing the availability of her thesis online. I don't know if it just recently became available or has been available for a long time. I've followed the Enfield case closely. I've read many hundreds of pages of material on it, I've been in contact with eyewitnesses of the events and some members of the Society for Psychical Research who are significantly knowledgeable about the case, and I've listened to many hours of audio about it, including recent podcasts, radio programs, etc. I've never heard anybody refer to having read Gregory's thesis, much less have I ever heard anybody say that the general public could download it for free online. I don't know if this is a recent development. I'm emailing some people to try to find out.

As my article linked above discusses, Will Storr wrote about his unsuccessful efforts to get Gregory's thesis a little over a decade ago. Apparently, it had been kept from the public up to that point because Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair threatened to take legal action over it. You can read more about that situation in my article linked above and in Storr's book. My impression had been that nothing significant had changed since Storr's book was published. If the availability of Gregory's thesis is widely known, why haven't skeptics been citing it? Why didn't it come up in discussions about The Conjuring 2? Will Storr has occasionally discussed the Enfield case in recent years, and I've never seen him say anything about getting a copy of Gregory's thesis. It never came up in any of Guy Playfair's last interviews, as far as I know, and I don't think I missed any. Perhaps his recent death is what made the thesis available.

Whether this is a recent development or not, it deserves far more attention than it's gotten so far. This is a major advance in the public's ability to study the Enfield case.

Whitewingers

Recently, James White said the primary threat to freedom in America isn't coming from Muslims but from secular progressives. But there are several problems with that claim:

i) If we continue the status quo immigration policy, combined with the fact that Muslims have higher fertility rates than most natives, the threat that Muslims in American pose to our Constitutional republic will rapidly expand. (BTW, I don't object to big families.)

ii) White erects a false dichotomy between Islam and the liberal establishment. Yet it's well-known that the Left protects Islam. A recent example is how Berkeley canceled the scheduled speech by Richard Dawkins. 

iii) Ironically, Islam is using secular academia as a front organization:

https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/how-an-iranian-front-group-infiltrated-41-us-universities#undefined.uxfs 

Another example how Brandeis disinvited Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Secular academia facilitates sharia and jihad by acting as a buffer between Muslim activists and their critics.

iv) In addition, the major internet providers and search engines are censoring criticism or information about Islam. For instance:

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2016/11/uk-internet-provider-o2-blocks-me

https://www.prageru.com/youtube-continues-restrict-many-prageru-videos-fight-back

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429190/islam-twitter-and-free-speech

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/digital/exmuslim-group-slams-facebook-censorship-of-its-views/news-story/b88b893bde33de97f31f336e90b87180

http://aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-muslim-groups-welcome-changes-to-google-results/869584

Stop to consider the implications of that. The Internet is now a major source of news. Perhaps the major source of news. People do online searches to get information about Islam. But if search results now filter out evidence that Islam is dangerous, then the general public won't be able to fact-check Islam. Likewise, social media has become the primary means of sharing information and mobilizing social activism. If that is blocked, what's the recourse? These are powerful, insidious ways to silence and shut down opposition.

What we have, then, is an emerging alliance between Muslims and the liberal establishment. A silent revolution. 

Academic groupthink

http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-s-Assault-on/239496

The 7 biggest problems facing science

"The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists"

"Why, to protect Christ’s little ones"

The Illusion of Respectability by Allen Guelzo.

The link between homosexuality and pederasty

Homosexual apologists often bristle at moral comparisons between homosexuality and pederasty. When Christians bring this up, they treat that comparison as scurrilous and defamatory. But consider the linkage in academia. Consider all the sympathetic articles on pederasty in the Journal of Homosexuality. It isn't just Christians, but homosexual academics who are making that linkage. Consider sympathetic articles on pederasty in the Journal of Homosexuality (or the Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality):

The  Journal of Homosexuality is an internationally acclaimed, peer-reviewed publication devoted to publishing a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship to foster a thorough understanding of the complexities, nuances, and the multifaceted aspects of sexuality and gender. The chief aim of the journal is to publish thought-provoking scholarship by researchers, community activists, and scholars who employ a range of research methodologies and who offer a variety of perspectives to continue shaping knowledge production in the arenas of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) studies and queer studies. 

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=wjhm20#.VaqCjihW400

The Dispersion of Pederasty and the Athletic Revolution in Sixth-Century BC Greece

Thomas F. Scanlon PhD

Journal: Journal of Homosexuality

Volume 49, Issue 3-4, December 2005, pages 63-85

Published online: 22 Sep 2008

Pindar's Tenth Olympian and Athlete-Trainer Pederasty

Thomas Hubbard PhD

Journal: Journal of Homosexuality

Volume 49, Issue 3-4, December 2005, pages 137-171

Published online: 22 Sep 2008

Pederasty Among Primitives:

Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg PhD

Journal: Journal of Homosexuality

Volume 20, Issue 1-2, February 1991, pages 13-30

Published online: 22 Mar 2012

PEDERASTY, HEROISM, AND THE FAMILY IN CLASSICAL GREECE

John R. Ungaretti

Journal: Journal of Homosexuality

Volume 3, Issue 3, May 1978, pages 291-300

Published online: 18 Oct 2010

Reconsiderations About Greek Homosexualities

William Armstrong Percy III PhD

Journal: Journal of Homosexuality

Volume 49, Issue 3-4, December 2005, pages 13-61

Published online: 22 Sep 2008

The Heroes And Villains Of History

I just heard Michael Medved discussing a recent study about who people consider the best and worst figures in history. The study involved about seven thousand students, with an average age of 23, from a few dozen countries around the world.

Jesus was ranked as the sixth best historical figure. George Bush was ranked as the fourth worst, even worse than Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

The study divided the respondents into four groups. The article I linked above comments:

"The only figure that all four groups disliked was Bush, the study found."

I think the study results reflect more negatively on the respondents than on Bush. The results also reflect poorly on the sources who have been misinforming these students, like the mainstream media and Hollywood.

Keep this study in mind the next time you hear about how much more intelligent the people in other nations are and how we should heed what they tell us about how bad people like George Bush are, how bad capitalism is, etc. If students in other nations, as well as many in this country, have such a severe case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, why should we trust their judgment? And the study results are absurd even if you ignore the ridiculous treatment of Bush.

The Modern University Is Failing Students in Every Respect

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Modern American universities used to assume four goals.

First, their general education core taught students how to reason inductively and imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, "Medea" and "King Lear," Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," and astronomy and Euclidean geometry.

Second, campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression — and exposure to all sorts of weird ideas and mostly unpopular thoughts. College talk was never envisioned as boring, politically correct megaphones echoing orthodox pieties.

Third, four years of college trained students for productive careers. Implicit was the university's assurance that its degree was a wise career investment.

Finally, universities were not monopolistic price gougers. They sought affordability to allow access to a broad middle class that had neither federal subsidies nor lots of money.

The American undergraduate university is now failing on all four counts.

Read the rest here.

A Professor's Misleading Christmas Quiz

Leonard Hitchcock, professor emeritus at Idaho State University, recently posted a quiz consisting of misleading questions about the infancy narratives. It's a good illustration of how ignorant many skeptics are about matters surrounding Jesus' birth and how inaccurately they often frame the issues.

God's not dead

Oxford philosopher Vince Vitale explains:

(See here for an interview with Vitale.)

The Bryan College Controversy

The usual suspects (e.g. Peter Enns, Rachel Held Evans) have been tearing their hair out about the recent change Bryan College's doctrinal statement. Here's an inside perspective from someone who's critical of the process, but sympathetic to the substance:

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2014/03/its-called-grace.html

Academically adrift

Bill Gates reviews the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.

An Interview You Should Listen To And How It Reflects Academia

I recommend listening to a remarkable interview Alex Tsakiris recently did with Patricia Churchland. Why would such a prominent scholar make such dubious claims, argue so poorly, and behave so irresponsibly? Churchland reflects some common problems in academia. Many scholars know significantly less than they suggest they do, don't respond well when challenged, and are astonishingly lacking in their ethical standards.