Discussion:

Discussion for article #229412

Any Presorted stamp in the place of a stamp is immediately suspect.

Well, Mike Wheat is screwed…

What the hell??

Based on who contributed to the campaigns?!?

Yes, that is sometimes indicative but it is also something that the candidate does not necessarily control.

Yes, I’d down grade someone who got contributions from the Koch brothers but often contributions are based on how bad the other guy is… not because a candidate’s position is identical to your own.

But, but we were told yesterday at TPM that the information was good and the science righteous.

Curious that these university presidents only address Montana voters. These mailers also went out to folks in California and New Hampshire using their state seals also. “Persuading” the home states’ election honchos not to complain?

“We sincerely regret we singled out you red-state rubes for our own little political experiment. When you’re from elite schools, you naturally think you’re superior, and while we of course are, we shouldn’t have done this. Our bad.”

It’s a phony apology. The main problem is that it was sent at all, that it couldn’t but confuse things in the midst of an election, not that it was mislabeled.

As a citizen and voter in the state of Montana, I deeply resented the intrusion of these University researchers into our elections. I took the time to attend a candidates’ panel where the four men running for our non-partisan Supreme Court appeared and explained their values, their history and why they deserved my vote. It was absolutely crystal clear the two incumbent judges were qualified head and shoulders above the two challengers. Using ANY scale of desirable qualifications for Supreme Court justice, Justice Rice and Justice Wheat deserve to be returned to the Court and the two carpetbagging challengers should go back to some other line of work.

Now that is an apology. Should be framed and read by every politician who feels the need for a non-apology apology any time soon. Clear responsibility, clear outline of future course, clear expression of regret for past actions.

This is the reaction you’d expect from responsible academics when research goes ethically down the drain.

H. L. Mencken once said that there is never an idea so stupid that you can’t find a college professor behind. In this case, it was two.

whatever.

three.

While the ethical implications of this study were murky, this article, and the letter from the presidents of the two universities, is also misleading.

The letter makes no mention of whether the research was cleared by Dartmouth’s IRB; the omission leads one to conclude that it probably was, and the author of this article appears to have made no effort to figure out this important point.

If Dartmouth’s IRB approved the research, then the tone of the letter and this article is misleading at best.

TPM and other sources have previously reported that the research was approved by Dartmouth’s IRB.

What isn’t clear yet, and can’t be without investigation, is whether or not there were differences between the materials and methods presented for IRB approval and the materials and methods actually used. I have noted that one possibility is that the Dartmouth IRB approved the text and a rough layout of the flyer, but may not have seen the final layout with the state seal.

Research that involves human subjects typically needs initial IRB approval even before a proposal is submitted for funding, and then final IRB approval as details as materials and methods reach their final form.