Ask mj: "Clinically Proven"

An anonymous reader asks mj: "What does 'clinically proven' mean? It's in all the commercials for drugs and whatnot. Is there anything that isn't clinically proven?"

The answer to the second part is yes and no. But you'll never hear someone advertise whether something that wasn't clinically proven.

The process of getting FDA approval for a drug is long and difficult, most drugs that companies start to develop never make it through the entire process which involves clinical studies near the end.

The studies are usually paid for (and often conducted by) the pharmaceutical company that creates the drug. The real catch, however, is that the company get to choose which studies they submit to the FDA and which ones they do not.* Moreover they are under no obligation to make the study public (e.g., publish it anywhere). The study is actually considered proprietary information.*

This post has been in the making for awhile, I was going to use Lunesta as an example which of course advertised itself as clinically proven, but previously did not post actual results of any of the clinical trials. Since that time at least one study is available on their website although details of the study are not provided which is necessary to actually evaluate whether the study was "good" or not.

The final note is important, it is extremely easy to spin studies however one wants. Hence the multiple headlines in the media, "New study suggests that [noun] [increases/decreases] chance of [disease/heart attack/stroke/whatever]." While I am not going to bother to go into details, but it is extremely difficult to both design and carry a good study (this has applications beyond medication, sociological studies, economic studies, etc., [basically anything that isn't a hard science] suffer many of the same difficulties.)

Final word: unless an independently conducted and publicly reviewed study was conducted "clincically proven" doesn't mean much at all. And don't expect the media to accurately report on "studies." Unless the organization takes a hard look at the study (which is rare) the reporting is from the abstract, which also means little by itself.

*This was at least true three months ago when the post was started. As far as I know it is still true, but I no longer remember the sources I used other than to say they were reputable.

Watching Bethel

It's been a bit since I put up a time lapse so here is one from later today. I am also working on a better script to render it, to get rid of those nasty night pictures from where they left a light on.

I also need to start writing down some of the blog posts the keep popping into my head (really, pretty much completely written) but never make here. Maybe I'll more than two regular visitors that way...

Watching Bethel

The latest, does not include today.

Actually... (aka Digital Recording II)

Assuming the background of this post, the amount of digital recording of other peoples' lives that I have through email, chats, journals, etc., is pretty amazing as well.

For anyone getting worried, save for the unfortunate of my untimely demise,* this is pretty much inaccessible to anyone but me. And even then it depends on my memory; my memory jogged by my own pictures, emails, chats, journals, writings (and blogs for that matter), etc.

Still, if you are one of the people that still read my blog, I probably have more of your life recorded than you realize. Of course, given how "digital I am," this goes two ways. Maybe more toward me than towards you (whoever you are, viz., my life has more digital recordings than most peoples'.)

*Untimely meaning before I am... old. In the most usual sense. E.g., before (or slightly before) I hit my expected lifespan. On the other hand, given the stunts that I have pulled I figure my expected lifespan is somewhere around 15, which I have obviously passed. Given that, I figure my new one is -- give or take -- 30.

Stripping Down Filenames in Bash

I've seen these two questions asked multiple times and have both haunted me from time to time, so I thought I would provide some answers, although the second is rather rudimentary.

1. Stripping the path off of a file
How often have you needed only the filename, not the path that precedes it? Fortunately most Linux distros make it pretty easy to strip off with the basename command. E.g.,

user@host:~$ basename /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
httpd.conf

Note that if the path contains spaces you will need to enclose it in quotes or escape it:

#Escaping
user@host:~$ basename /home/madjon/youth\ room\ shots/local\ youth\ demographics.xls
local youth demographics.xls

#Quoting
user@host:~$ basename "/home/madjon/youth room shots/local youth demographics.xls"
local youth demographics.xls

2. Stripping the file extension
This takes some bash string manipulation which you can find all about at tldp. If we take httpd.conf again:

# First, assign the filename to a variable:
user@host:~$ f=/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
user@host:~$ echo $f
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

#Next, strip out any string, starting from the end of $f that matches ".*"
user@host:~$ echo ${f%.*}
/etc/apache2/httpd

Note that the variable substitution (the curly brackets) doesn't have the $ inside it. E.g., the general syntax is:

VAR=whatever
echo ${VAR%.*}

If we want to put them together:

user@host:~$ f=/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
user@host:~$ f=`basename $f`
user@host:~$ echo $f
httpd.conf
user@host:~$ echo ${f%.*}
httpd

I'm sure that this could be accomplished easier with some regex and awk or sed, but all three of those are confusing to me; simple bash scripting makes much more sense to me. I hope this helps whomever.

The Digital Recording of My Life

Holy cow, it's late! I meant to be in bed nearly 45 minutes ago, but I had this post...

I've been working on a writing project for some time now, it was completely lost when my hard drive on my laptop died. Fortunately, the sources that I pulled most of it from (all my own original writing) still are around.

But I had to go and find these files again which have been scattered across several hard drives email, and multiple folders. What really struck me was that between the emails, my writing -- both homework and journals -- and blog entries, I have a pretty detailed record of my life, at least from the last 4-5 years. I may or may not be able to recover data further back than that, but it gets sparser at that point anyway.

It just is amazing how much of our lives are becoming self-recording without our even thinking about it...

Watching Bethel

I partially broke my system for completing time lapses, thus the break in them. At any rate, this is the most recent as of yesterday.

Also, I am hoping to actually start blog blogging again soon, at least at best as I can. I have at least one draft post on economics -- even if only one person reads it :-)