Just received this in my email. As I have said before (The Tree of Life: How to stop press release spam? Post embargoed press releases) I am sick of getting unsolicited press releases that are embargoed and do not have any relevance to my work. They are SPAM. And to discourage this practice I am posting them to my blog when I receive them in order to break their embargo which I did not agree to. Please – all of you out there sending out unsolicited PR SPAM – stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
EMBARGOED TO 6 P.M. EST, SATURDAY, FEB. 18, 2012
(3 P.M. PST, SATURDAY, FEB. 18, 2012)
Contact: Jill Scoggins, 502-475-2428, jill.scoggins@louisville.edu
UofL RESEARCH SHOWS SUBSTITUTING WITH SMOKELESS TOBACCO SAVES LIVES
Presentation at AAAS shows scientific foundation for tobacco harm reduction efforts
VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Substituting smokeless tobacco products can save smokers’ lives, and there is a scientific foundation that proves it.
That is the message Brad Rodu, D.D.S., professor of medicine at the University of Louisville (UofL) School of Medicine and the Endowed Chair in Tobacco Harm Reduction at UofL’s James Graham Brown Cancer Center, delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Feb. 18. Rodu spoke at the session, “Harm Reduction: Policy Change to Reduce the Global Toll of Smoking-Related Disease.”
“Quit or die: That’s been the brutal message delivered to 45 million American smokers, and it has helped contribute to 443,000 deaths per year, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” Rodu said. “The truth, however, is that total nicotine and tobacco abstinence is unattainable and unnecessary for many smokers.”
Rodu’s presentation, “Transforming Tobacco Use: The Potential of Tobacco Harm Reduction,” was based on his almost 20 years of research. His work shows that smokers can greatly reduce their risk of disease and death by replacing smoking products with e-cigarettes or modern, spit-free smokeless tobacco. These products provide a much safer alternative for those smokers who are unable or unwilling to quit smoking because they continue to deliver nicotine without the harmful effect of smoking.
“Nicotine is addictive, but it is not the cause of any smoking-related disease. Like caffeine, nicotine can be used safely by consumers,” Rodu said.
Decades of epidemiologic research bear out Rodu’s findings. While no tobacco product is completely safe, smokeless products have been shown to be 98 percent safer than cigarettes. In the United Kingdom, the Royal College of Physicians reported in 2002 that smokeless tobacco is up to 1,000 times less hazardous than smoking, and in 2007, further urged world governments to seriously consider instituting tobacco harm reduction strategies as a means to save lives.
To see the proof of what tobacco harm reduction can do, look to Sweden, Rodu said. “Over the past 50 years, Swedish men have had Europe’s highest per capita consumption of smokeless tobacco as well as Europe’s lowest cigarette use. During the same time, they also have the lowest rate of lung cancer than men in any other European country.”
In the United States, steps have been made to document the value of tobacco harm reduction. In 2006, a National Cancer Institute-funded study estimated that if tobacco harm reduction was “responsibly communicated” to smokers, 4 million would switch to smokeless tobacco. The American Council on Science and Health – which organized Rodu’s session at the AAAS Annual Meeting – concluded in the same year that tobacco harm reduction “shows great potential as a public health strategy to help millions of smokers.”
Rodu is well aware of the controversy his research findings generate. Opponents of any use of nicotine delivery products maintain that smokeless tobacco puts the user at great risk for oral cancer, a position not supported by research.
“The risk of mouth cancer among smokeless tobacco users is extremely low – certainly lower than the risk of smoking-related diseases among smokers,” he said. “The annual mortality rate among long-term dry snuff users is 12 deaths per 100,000 and the rate among users of more popular snus, moist snuff and chewing tobacco is much lower. For perspective, the death rate among automobile users is 11 per 100,000 according to a 2009 report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Compare those to the rate among smokers: more than 600 deaths per 100,000 every year”
“The data clearly show that smokeless tobacco users have, at most, about the same risk of dying from mouth cancer as automobile users have of dying in a car wreck.”
About Brad Rodu
Rodu earned his dental degree from The Ohio State University. After an oral pathology residency program at Emory University, he completed fellowships at the University of Alabama at Birmingham sponsored by the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute. He was on the UAB faculty from 1981 to 2005 with appointments in several departments in the schools of Medicine, Public Health and Dentistry. He joined the UofL faculty in 2005. His research is supported by unrestricted grants from tobacco manufacturers to the University of Louisville and by the Kentucky Research Challenge Trust Fund.
Just received the three emails below regarding results of three UC Davis Faculty Senate Resolutions regarding the pepper spray incident from November and thought they might be of some interest. See this post for a little background.
REPORT OF THE DAVIS DIVISION OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE COMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS, RULES AND JURISDICTION
On December 20, 2011, a petition bearing the signatures of at least 50 members of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate of the University of California was submitted asking that the following Motion Concerning Police Actions be voted on by the membership of the Davis Division (tenure/tenure-track faculty of the UC Davis Campus):
Motion:
Be it resolved that that the Davis Division of the Senate of the University of California hereby (1) condemns both the dispatch of police and use of excessive force in response to non-violent protests on November 18, 2011;
(2) opposes violent police response to non-violent protests on campus;
(3) demands that police deployment against protestors be considered only after all reasonable efforts have been exhausted and with direct consultation with Academic Senate leadership.
The Davis Division membership was notified on February 3, 2012 that on-line balloting was open and would be closed on February 17, 2012, at 5:00 PM. The on-line ballot results were reviewed by the Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction on February 17, 2012 after 5:00 PM and are reported as follows:
Total eligible voters: 2,693
Required to pass: Majority
Vote received:
Yes: 635
No: 343
Invalid Ballots: 0
The Motion was therefore declared approved and the University of California, Davis Division of the Academic Senate does support the Motion Concerning Police Actions.
Respectfully submitted,
Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction
G.J. Mattey, Chair
James Fadel
Mark Grismer
REPORT OF THE DAVIS DIVISION OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE
COMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS, RULES AND JURISDICTION
On December 15, 2011, a petition bearing the signatures of at least 50 members of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate of the University of California was submitted asking that the following Five-Resolution Vote of Confidence be voted on by the membership of the Davis Division (tenure/tenure-track faculty of the UC Davis Campus):
Resolution:
Be it therefore resolved that the Davis Division of the Academic Senate:
1) Condemns both the dispatch of police in response to non-violent protests and the use of excessive force that led to the deplorable pepper-spraying events of November 18, 2011.
2) Opposes all violent police responses to non-violent protests on campus.
3) Demands that police deployment against protesters be considered only after all reasonable administrative efforts to bridge differences have been exhausted, including direct consultation with the leadership of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate.
4) Accepts Chancellor Linda Katehi’s good faith apology.
5) Expresses confidence in Chancellor Linda Katehi’s leadership and efforts to place UC Davis among the top 5 public universities in the nation.
The Davis Division membership was notified on February 3, 2012 that on-line balloting was open and would be closed on February 17, 2012, at 5:00 PM. The on-line ballot results were reviewed by the Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction on February 17, 2012 after 5:00 PM and are reported as follows:
Total eligible voters: 2,693
Required to pass: Majority
Vote received:
Yes: 586
No: 408
Invalid Ballots: 0
The Motion was therefore declared approved and the University of California, Davis Division of the Academic Senate does support the Five-Resolution Vote of Confidence.
Respectfully submitted,
Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction
G.J. Mattey, Chair
James Fadel
Mark Grismer
REPORT OF THE DAVIS DIVISION OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE
COMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS, RULES AND JURISDICTION
On December 6, 2011, a petition bearing the signatures of at least 50 members of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate of the University of California was submitted asking that the following Motion Concerning the Chancellor’s Judgment be voted on by the membership of the Davis Division (tenure/tenure-track faculty of the UC Davis Campus):
Motion: In light of the events on the quadrangle of the UC Davis campus on the afternoon of Friday November 18, 2011, in light of Chancellor Linda Katehi’s email to faculty of November 18 in which she admitted that she had ordered the police to take action against the students who were demonstrating on the quadrangle and said that she had had “no option” but to proceed in this way, and in light of the failure of Chancellor Katehi to act effectively to resolve the resulting crisis in the intervening days,
Be it therefore resolved that the Davis Division of the Senate of the University of California lacks confidence in the leadership of Chancellor Katehi, and
Be it also resolved that the result of the vote on this motion be communicated to the Board of Regents and the President of the University of California.
The Davis Division membership was notified on February 3, 2012 that on-line balloting was open and would be closed on February 17, 2012, at 5:00 PM. The on-line ballot results were reviewed by the Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction on February 17, 2012 after 5:00 PM and are reported as follows:
Total eligible voters: 2,693
Required to pass: Majority
Vote received:
Yes: 312
No: 697
Invalid Ballots: 0
The Motion was therefore declared defeated and the University of California, Davis Division of the Academic Senate does not support the Motion Concerning the Chancellor’s Judgment.
Respectfully submitted,
Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction
G.J. Mattey, Chair
James Fadel
Mark Grismer
Much has been written recently about a call to boycott Elsevier due to their outrageous policies regarding academic publishing. I support the boycott but I also agree with many others who have said it perhaps unnecessarily singles out one publisher over others who also have publishing policies that could, well, use a bit of work. And one such publisher is AAAS – the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Today, the annual meeting of AAAS begins today in Vancouver. I was supposed to be there by now, but thanks to some technical problems at Alaska Airlines, I am back in Davis for the day. AAAS has some policies regarding openness that I believe are unnecessary and not in the general interest of scientific progress. One is the strange “talk embargoes” I have written about recently. Another, which is much more problematic, is the fact that Science Magazine (published by AAAS) does not deposit archival content in Pubmed Central. Now, mind you, I think all scientific publishing funded by taxpayer money should be openly and freely available immediately. But that is not going to happen immediately.
One helpful tool in making scientific literature freely available is Pubmed Central. Most scientific societies I know of deposit published material in Pubmed Central after some initial delay of 3-6-12 months. But for reasons that are not entirely clear (to me at least, or to a Google search), AAAS clings to their archival material making it only available through their own web site. Sure – they do allow authors to deposit their version of their manuscripts in Pubmed Central after a delay. But most alas do not do this. And I note – this option is only open to NIH and Wellcome Trust funded work. So much material cannot be deposited anyway.
AAAS’s policy seems unnecessarily closed accessy and limits the impact and spread of the knowledge contained within papers in Science. I note – this policy is yet another reason to not publish in Science and to instead choose either fully open access journals or ones that at least release their stranglehold on the papers after a short delay.
Today I call on AAAS to make archival literature from Science Magazine available in Pubmed Central. And I call on others out there, such as those at the AAAS meeting, to pressure AAAS to do this. Write blog posts. Call and email AAAS members and leadership. Email AAAS. And so on.
Ideally everyone would just publish in fully open access journals and the journals would deposit material in archives. But until that happens, we need to make every effort to increase the amount of literature getting into Pubmed Central and other archives. So – pressure AAAS. And while everyone is at it, please deposit whatever you can in preprint servers, in various repositories and in Pubmed Central. Every little bit helps.
“A prize is offered to the individual or team that can provide a very large, phylogenetically-organized set(s) of scientific names suitable for ingestion into the Encyclopedia of Life as an alternate browsing hierarchy.
- Names must be provided in Darwin Core Archive1 format.
- Extinct organisms may be treated but are not required.
- Ranks are not required for names but may be included.
- Internal nodes need not all have formal Linnaean names but require a label which can be arbitrary. Leaf nodes also need not have formal names but ideally most will overlap with current EOL species pages.
- For the purpose of this contest, metrics and source of node support, branch lengths, vernaculars, and synonyms are not required. These may be included; not all are currently displayable on EOL.
- Trees must be rooted. Multiple, overlapping hierarchies may be submitted as a set (e.g. to handle reticulation)
Among other factors, the total number of uniquely named nodes, node/leaf ratios and tree height may be used to compare entries so contestants should consider how they wish to trade off strict consensus versus other methods of reflecting the state of phylogenetic knowledge.Problems to solve include 1) how to assign labels to unnamed nodes, 2) how to fill in gaps so that the set of taxa included is as comprehensive as possible, even if trees are not fully resolved or all taxa have not been analyzed, 3) how to handle competing hypotheses, 4) how to update the hierarchy at least annually.The winning submission must be available to EOL and others under an acceptable CC license if it is under copyright. The tree need not be previously published in peer-reviewed form.Questions about the challenge may be asked in the Phylogenetic Tree Challenge community on EOL.”
And then as the evening progressed I found out more detail from the internal documents of the Heartland Institute that are even more disturbing:
The ultimate to me is in this leaked document:
Development of our “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms” project. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.
Let me repeat one part:
His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.
UPDATE: Some additional news stories and posts of relevance
http://storify.com/phylogenomics/scholarly-kitchen-bloggers-response-to-questions.js?template=slideshow[<a href=”http://storify.com/phylogenomics/scholarly-kitchen-bloggers-response-to-questions” target=”_blank”>View the story “Scholarly Kitchen Bloggers response to questions” on Storify</a>]
UPDATE 4: More stories
UPDATE 6: 2-15 8 PM More stories
Lizzy Wilbanks will be presenting this week’s Eisenlab meeting in room 5206 of the genome center from 1:30pm to 3:30 pm
If you’re looking to catch up on your reading, come to journal club!
The Meta-omics journal club is run weekly on Tuesdays, from 11-12 in 5202 GBSF (organized by the Facciotti Lab, papers are sent around via an e-mail list).
There is also a bi-weekly Phylogenetics journal club run by the Center for Population Biology, 4-5pm every other Friday in Storer 5343 (The Treehouse). Regardless of journal club, there is always a 5pm Happy Hour at CPB every Friday – although be warned there are always are a substantial number of vertebrate biologists in attendence.
Earlier this AM I posted to twitter a brief comment about articles in Pubmed Central that reference Valentine’s Day.
Yes, there are 120 papers that come up in Pubmed Central w/ a search for “Valentine’s Day”shar.es/fSi8b
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) February 14, 2012
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Kay Thaney’s response caught my eye b/c she called attention to some of the more interesting papers from my link:
@phylogenomics @David_Dobbs uplifting. among results, “sweet nothings?”, “parasuicide”,”diabetes bingo” + “HIV epidemics”. #loveisintheair
— Kaitlin Thaney (@kaythaney) February 14, 2012
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So I thought I would post a few of the links here:
I note – the paper is in “Frontiers in Extreme Microbiology” one of the new Open Access journals in the Frontiers series. Not sure yet what to think of all these Frontiers journals. But they do have a suite of journals in “Microbiology” so I will keep an eye on them …
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 