Tag Archives: Karolinska

A balanced view of ad hominem judgments

Posted on 20 August 2018 by | 12 comments

by Carl V Phillips

Tap tap tap. Is this thing on?

Welcome back to this blog. As many of you know, The Daily Vaper, where I published most of my good material for a year, has ceased publication (the articles, fortunately, are still archived at my author page at dailycaller.com, and they redirect from the original links if you have used those somewhere). I also recently did a “best of” Twitter thread highlighting some of what I wrote there (and here and elsewhere). There is something simultaneously atavistic and postmodern about watching (now nonexistent) the DV website slip slowly down the list of top guesses for where I might want to go when I open a new browser tab.

I am writing most of my subject-matter analysis under contract these days, with a bit of freelancing for commercial websites. Deep-think tangents will start to reappear here. Like this one. (I thought about doing it as a Twitter thread, but I realized that would never work.) Continue reading →

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Posted in truths

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More anti-THR junk science from UCSF, the new Karolinska

Posted on 25 March 2014 by | 8 comments

by Carl V Phillips

As I alluded to yesterday, there is another bit of anti-ecig junk science out today.  Once again, it is from the Glantz shop at UCSF.  Glantz did not put his name on this paper (presumably to create the illusion among the naive that this is not all part of a single organized disinformation campaign), but that hardly matters.

The little study (published as a “research letter”) followed a small group of smokers for one year, and compared quit rates for those who had recently tried an e-cigarette at the baseline survey and those who had not.  They found that those in the former group had a slightly lower abstinence from smoking at followup.  Clive Bates does a good job of pointing out how this thin result led to overblown conclusions, and then UCSF created a misleading press release, and this tricked the press into reporting out-and-out falsehoods.  Do read Clive’s post for more — there is no reason for me to repeat it here.  (If the NYT picks up the story, I might respond to that, but I am not inclined to spend any effort responding to random stories from unsophisticated news sources.) Continue reading →

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Posted in Lies

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