UK Home Office Restores Drug Science to the Back of the Bus

When I last took up the quixotic campaign of David Nutt, Ph.D., Professor of Psychopharmacology, Univ. of Bristol and former Chair of the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, it was to point out his belief that MDMA should be downgraded to a lesser harm category. He had issued opinion pieces comparing MDMA’s propensity for causing harm favorably with alcohol and waxed enthusiastic about the current clinical trials. The trigger for my post was his absurdist essay on the unfortunate harms to public health that are associated with addiction to “equasy”.

Please Welcome the New Sb StatsDude!

Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University, has joined the Scienceblogs as author of Applied Statistics. One look at his professional page and you will see why I am so happy to have him here:

Andrew has done research on a wide range of topics, including: …[snip]… methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference,

I think I am going to enjoy having this guy around. If you want to know what you are in for, visit his old blog for a taste.

"..have to be ten times more charmin' than that Arnold on Green Acres, know what I'm saying?"

I’d seen some sort of press release on this before but for some reason there is a new NIH brag note out today. It informs us that the NIH will be investing $27 Million to build yet another useless failed attempt to create social networking and professional networking entities that are specific to scientists.

Charming and Loaded! [source]Before into the specifics, let’s talk about opportunity cost. Thanks to a newfound tool to snoop Indirect Cost rates I feel more comfortable with my assertion that ~55% is a decent estimated IDC rate for the larger public Universities with heavy research focus. An IDC rate of ~90% applies to a number of the smaller, private research institutions that think very highly of themselves with a big reputation. This gives us our range for the full-modular R01 ($250,000 in direct costs for 5 years) as something between $387,500 / yr ($1.94M for 5 yrs) and $475,000 / yr ($2.38M / 5yrs). In rough numbers we are talking about anywhere from 11 to 14 full-modular R01 awards that are being poured into this project.
Of course, since this is the ARRA / stimulus funding, this amount of money is being poured in over a mere two years. Thus, 28-35 two-year intervals of full-modular R01 funding.
It better be one charming [muppethugging] pig*.