Seth’s blog

According to Publisher’s Weekly, a new program at amazon.com called

Amazon Vine rewards the site’s elite reviewers by giving them access to advance copies. According to a representative at Amazon, invitations have gone out to the site’s “top reviewers,” deemed so by their review rankings, to become Vine Voices.

I once read about a Los Angeles catering business that wasn’t doing so well until they doubled their prices. This is the opposite of that.

From Seth Godin:

When the Times switched from 10 books on the Hardcover [Best Sellers] list, they created a list of 15 Hardcover [Best Sellers] and a list of 5 Advice, How To and Miscellaneous [Best Sellers]. I wrote in and asked the editor why they only had 5 titles on this list and 15 on the others. She wrote back and said,

“Because we don’t want people to read those books.”

Pride goeth before a fall.

An article in this week’s BMJ about problems with clinical trials makes some of the points I made in a recent post. The article is based on a London conference held last week. In my post, I said the evaluation of the Shangri-La Diet going on at the SLD forums was in many ways better than a clinical trial.

At the conference, a speaker complained that

key groups of participants were often excluded from clinical studies

I pointed out that anyone could post at the SLD forums.

Doug Altman, professor of statistics in medicine at Oxford University, said that the presentation of statistical results of clinical trials “lacked transparency and precluded any further analysis.”

I said that the forums are more transparent.

Paul Glasziou, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, warned that many clinical trials described treatments that were difficult to replicate in normal clinical settings.

I said that the forums were more realistic — meaning that the treatments being tested were closer to what actually could happen.

“Religion is extremely important to the Tibetans,” says Wikipedia, but what does that mean? The Tibetan Buddhism entry is no help. Last night at dinner, however, I did learn what it means, at least in part. Tibetans spend a vast amount of time on religious observances — what the observer (Bryan Ng, a Berkeley engineer) called a “religion tax.” One example was a well-observed month-long annual religious festival. Another was a sensationally slow method of travel: Take a step or two, bow down, lie down on the ground, get up, take another step, bow down, and so on. This method is used to cover long distances, such as 20 miles or more. The extremely devout do this along highways.

The Chinese government wants to reduce the influence of religion, he said. Goods imported into Tibet from China via the new railway should increase commerce, for example. The power of the Chinese government makes it likely they will succeed.

The education improvement program — merit pay for teachers as part of a larger package — promoted by the Milken Family Foundation received a big public boost last week with this NY Times article about a similar program in Minnesota.

A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession. . . Minnesota’s experience shows . . . that an incentive plan created with union input can draw teacher support.

The plan that is gaining support was devised by Lowell Milken, according to Jana Rausch, who works for the Milken Family Foundation on this initiative. Before he started the foundation, Lowell Milken was a lawyer. As far as education goes, he is self-taught. Yet the program he devised seems to be working better than other programs. Of course many people have proposed merit pay for teachers; but it is the Milken Family Foundation that has managed to make it work. We need engineers to build a better plane. But we do not need education experts, apparently, to build better schools.

foreign-aid experts
medical doctors
book writers
clinical trials
psychotherapists
psychotherapists again
education experts
spiritual experts
clinical trials again
book reviewers
journalists
expert vs math models
ICU doctors
fugu processors
surgeons