How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?

Alexis C. Madrigal & Robinson Meyer
The Atlantic
Originally posted 21 May 20

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.

This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.

Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this.

The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.

The info is here.

The New Standardized Morality Test. Really.

Peter Greene
Forbes - Education
Originally published September 13, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Morality is sticky and complicated, and I'm not going to pin it down here. It's one thing to manage your own moral growth and another thing to foster the moral development of family and friends and still quite another thing to have a company hired by a government draft up morality curriculum that will be delivered by yet another wing of the government. And it is yet another other thing to create a standardized test by which to give students morality scores.

But the folks at ACT say they will "leverage the expertise of U.S.-based research and test development teams to create the assessment, which will utilize the latest theory and principles of social and emotional learning (SEL) through the development process." That is quite a pile of jargon to dress up "We're going to cobble together a test to measure how moral a student is. The test will be based on stuff."

ACT Chief Commercial Officer Suzana Delanghe is quoted saying "We are thrilled to be supporting a holistic approach to student success" and promises that they will create a "world class assessment that measures UAE student readiness" because even an ACT manager knows better than to say that they're going to write a standardized test for morality.

The info is here.

What Does an Infamous Biohacker’s Death Mean for the Future of DIY Science?

Kristen Brown
The Atlantic
Originally posted May 5, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

At just 28, Traywick was among the most infamous figures in the world of biohacking—the grandiose CEO of a tiny company called Ascendance Biomedical whose goal was to develop and test new gene therapies without the expense and rigor of clinical trials or the oversight of the FDA. Traywick wanted to cure cancer, herpes, HIV, and even aging, and he wanted to do it without having to deal with the rules and safety precautions of regulators and industry standards.

“There are breakthroughs in the world that we can actually bring to market in a way that wouldn’t require us to butt up against the FDA’s walls, but instead walk around them,” Traywick told me the first time I met him in person, during a biotech conference in San Francisco last January.

To “walk around” regulators, Ascendance and other biohackers typically rely on testing products on themselves. Self-experimentation, although strongly discouraged by agencies like the FDA, makes it difficult for regulators to intervene. The rules that govern drug development simply aren’t written to oversee what an individual might do to themselves.

(cut)

The biggest shame, said Zayner, is that we’ll never get the chance to see how Traywick might have matured once he’d been in the biohacking sphere a little longer.

Whatever their opinion of Traywick, everyone who knew him agreed that he was motivated by an extreme desire to make drugs more widely available for those who need them.

The information is here.

Psychology will fail if it keeps using ancient words like “attention” and “memory”

Olivia Goldhill
Quartz.com
Originally published April 7, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Then there are “jangle fallacies,” when two things that are the same are seen as different because they have different names. For example, “working memory” is used to describe the ability to keep information mind. It’s not clear this is meaningfully different from simply “paying attention” to particular aspects of information.

Scientific concepts should be operationalized, meaning measurable and testable in experiments that produce clear-cut results. “You’d hope that a scientific concept would name something that one can use to then make predictions about how it’s going to work. It’s not clear that ‘attention’ does that for us,” says Poldrack.

It’s no surprise “attention” and “memory” don’t perfectly map onto the brain functions scientists know of today, given that they entered the lexicon centuries ago, when we knew very little about the internal workings of the brain or our own mental processes. Psychology, Poldrack argues, cannot be a precise science as long as it relies on these centuries-old, lay terms, which have broad, fluctuating usage. The field has to create new terminology that accurately describes mental processes. “It hurts us a lot because we can’t really test theories,” says Poldrack. “People can talk past one another. If one person says I’m studying ‘working memory’ and the other people says ‘attention,’ they can be finding things that are potentially highly relevant to one another but they’re talking past one another.”

The information is here.

Two Psychologists Charged in $25.2 Million Fraud Scheme Involving Psychological Testing in Gulf Coast States

FBI Press Release
Originally released October 22, 2015

Two clinical psychologists were charged today with participating in a $25 million Medicare fraud scheme involving psychological testing in nursing homes in Gulf Coast states.

Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Kenneth A. Polite of the Eastern District of Louisiana, Special Agent in Charge Michael J. Anderson of the FBI’s New Orleans Field Office and Special Agent in Charge C.J. Porter of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General’s (HHS-OIG) Dallas Regional Office made the announcement.

Beverly Stubblefield, Ph.D., 62, of Slidell, Louisiana, and John Teal, Ph.D., 46, of Jackson, Mississippi, were charged by a superseding indictment with conspiracy to commit health care fraud and conspiracy to make false statements related to health care matters. Two other defendants, Rodney Hesson, Psy.D., 46, and Gertrude Parker, 62, both of Slidell, were charged in the initial indictment returned in June 2015 in connection with a large-scale Medicare Fraud takedown, and were also charged in today’s superseding indictment.

According to the superseding indictment, Hesson and Parker owned and controlled Nursing Home Psychological Service (NHPS) and Psychological Care Services (PCS), each of which operated in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama. The superseding indictment alleges that NHPS and PCS contracted with nursing homes in these states to allow NHPS and PCS clinical psychologists, including Stubblefield, Teal and Hesson, to administer to nursing home residents psychological tests and related services that were not necessary and, in some instances, never provided.

According to the superseding indictment, between 2009 and 2015, NHPS and PCS submitted more than $25.2 million in claims to Medicare. Medicare paid approximately $17 million on those claims.

The entire pressor is here.

Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless

By Joseph Stromberg
Vox
Published on January 5, 2015

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably the most widely used personality test in the world.

An estimated 2 million people take it annually, at the behest of corporate HR departments, colleges, and even government agencies. The company that makes and markets the test makes somewhere around $20 million each year.

The only problem? The test is completely meaningless.

"There's just no evidence behind it," says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who's written about the shortcomings of the Myers-Briggs previously. "The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you'll be in a situation, how you'll perform at your job, or how happy you'll be in your marriage."

The entire article is here.