Blessed by the Potato

A friend linked to an article on drinking while pregnant, which sparked a spirited discussion on Facebook. I thought I’d go off on a bit of a tangent here, where the discussion is a bit more open (and where I can add in graphs).

I don’t have the free time these days to dig around in the literature to get fully up-to-speed, but basically here’s the science as I know it on drinking in pregnancy: it’s bad. We know that completely abstaining is our baseline: most moms-to-be are cautious and do this. And, we know that drinking a lot is bad. In-between, there isn’t a lot of good data: it may be a little bit bad to drink a little bit, or it may have no effect until some threshold has been hit, or it may even be slightly beneficial (as this recent article suggested). So there are some big error bars in the middle there.

To pick on this study in particular, it was a retrospective study that asked women what they drank during pregnancy many months after they had given birth. Though this kind of study can be insightful and guide further research, I wouldn’t be overturning a cautious, conservative hypothesis on that kind of data. I would caution moms-to-be out there to not go out and have a drink or two on the basis of a study like this.

This is how science works, generally: you get a weak-ass study that nonetheless is cheap to do and suggests something interesting, so you get some funding and ethics approval, and do a better study, and change your ideas of how the world works as the data comes in. But real-world considerations do get in the way sometimes.

A stronger study would be one with randomization, controlled variables, etc. The thing is, it’s unethical to run that kind of study, and I don’t know if there are good animal models for the more subtle forms of alcohol-related damage, due to the unique nature of frontal cortex development in humans. Plus, there isn’t really a demand for such a study: it’s not hard to abstain from drinking for 9 months. No serious scientist wants to spend time trying to find out what the safe limit is for alcohol in pregnancy when there are so many more pressing problems to address. Nobody would want to fund it: even the brewing companies wouldn’t touch it since even if you did show beyond a doubt that drinking some amount was safe (nay, beneficial), there would be a negligible effect on alcohol sales (if it found 1 drink/week was safe, that’s not even two cases of beer for the whole 9-month pregnancy). And it could be an expensive study if you were to follow a cohort of several thousand kids to age 10 or something in order to detect potentially subtle changes in IQ and social development.

So we’re stuck with imperfect information. We know the two ends of the curve fairly well, but have imperfect information for what lies in the middle. Our simple linear assumption may not be correct, but guessing wrong has consequences. In that case, the conservative thing to do is to assume that there is no safe level, and abstain completely. Which is what the current recommendations are.

An analogy would be radioactive materials: we know that a large amount of ionizing radiation is bad: it causes cancer, radiation sickness, necrosis, and death. We’ve seen it in accident victims and those near the WWII-era bombings and tests. But even with good animal models it’s hard to study the in-between doses. Once again we have a case with really good data at the extremes of the chart, but gaps and poor data in the middle leaving open the question of what the response looks like at intermediate doses. There is a hypothesis (called radiation hormesis) that small amounts of radiation are actually good for you, and there are some people testing that out… but there isn’t really a market for that study, either. So the principle of keeping the dose As Low As Reasonable Achievable (ALARA) is employed for those working with radioisotopes. For drinking, ALARA is zero: there is no “background level” of alcohol exposure; being pregnant is very unlike being a nuclear medicine technologist. It is very easy/achievable to just not drink while pregnant. I have no sympathies for someone who can’t abstain when presented with a good reason to do so (e.g.: someone who needs to drive somewhere, is pregnant, or is on call for some demanding job).

Now the point was raised in that long Facebook back-and-forth that women suffer a lot of second-guessing and judgment by people for what they put in or do with their bodies while pregnant. It can be harsh and unfair. For many things, yes, yes I think it is, especially since there are so many little things you’re supposed to do these days, and no one can ever be perfect (not even a pregnant woman).

One person suggested it was a double-standard to criticize a woman for drinking but not for a midnight ice cream pig-out. To that I say: there isn’t fetal mochaccino syndrome, or infant chocolate disorder (indeed, chocolate consumption seems to be beneficial), while there is fetal alcohol syndrome (and just as importantly, widespread knowledge thereof). So it’s a totally different thing to look down on someone drinking, smoking, or shooting heroin than it is to judge someone for pigging out, drinking caffeine, using a cell phone, or skipping the seafood portion — I wouldn’t consider it a double-standard at all.

As much time as I spend here turning over conventional wisdom with evidence, in this case I think the evidence is not definitive and the best course of action is to continue to abstain from drinking while pregnant.

Wayfare (and, I suppose, myself) chose to go with a midwife as the care provider for her pregnancy. As it turns out, the delivery was handled by an OB (and 2 other doctors and like 7 nurses), but that’s the way things go sometimes. In fact, I think that our case shows that the system in place in Ontario is a good one: had things progressed as planned, it would have been the midwife attending the delivery. Yet when preeclampsia lead to an induction and a complicated birth, the hospital on-call medical team was there and ready to help. Just because you choose a midwife doesn’t mean you give up the resources of the hospital in the worst-case scenario.

There are a tonne of resources out there about midwifery and how to make your decision, including several books (I know, Wayfare read many of them). In short, a midwife is someone who is a specialist in helping women in pregnancy and through to early post-natal care (such as breastfeeding), with a focus on natural delivery. It is a regulated profession, and in Ontario their use is covered by OHIP. There are many points in the debate about using a traditional physician or OB for pregnancy or a midwife, but the main ones are the potentially unnecessary interventions in physician-assisted births, and that midwives try to put the patient’s wishes first. In particular, the high Caesarean rates. A C-section is an invasive surgery, and while it’s very much needed in the delivery tool-kit, there’s a charge that it’s vastly over-used because it makes the doctor’s life easier at the expense of the patient’s wishes. The advocates of midwifery say that the majority of pregnancies and deliveries are very natural processes, and don’t require interventions or the specialized training of a surgeon. Instead, they need the support and guidance of a patient midwife.

So a midwife will work towards a natural birth, helping with positions and what-not, and can also provide some measure of interventions if needed. They’re very attentive to their mothers-to-be, with a typical midwife visit being an un-rushed affair with lots of opportunity to ask questions and get coaching along the way. There’s also a very good chance that the midwife who provides your prenatal care will be the one to help you through the delivery, whereas with a physician you may just get whoever is on call at the hospital that night. Plus she comes by a few times after birth to check on the baby and answer our many, many questions, which helps a lot since it takes a while to get around to getting a family doctor or pediatrician.

After all the research Wayfare did, and our own experience with the process, I think a midwife was a really good way to go, and I’d recommend it to other pregnant couples. If we haven’t high-risked ourselves out of the option, we’ll go with our midwife again. I make that recommendation with just a few minor caveats though:

The first is the big one for me: though midwives do hospital deliveries, many people associate the idea of a midwife with a home delivery, and many of the books and articles on midwives are intertwined with those on home births. They push not only a midwife for your natural (or mostly-natural) delivery, but also a home birth as being the best option. I was uncomfortable with the home birth idea before-hand (our plan was a midwife-assisted hospital delivery), and after our experience I think you’d have to be half-crazy to try a home-birth. Yes, a midwife has first aid training and certain supplies, but if something goes seriously wrong there’s just no way she could handle it. If you tear something (or in engineering speak, blow out an O-ring) and decide that yes, you would very much like the epidural after all, you’re out of luck. So if you start reading up on midwives and come across this information on the magical wonder of a home birth, I’d say to skip over that option. Indeed, I wouldn’t even necessarily pick a regular hospital delivery: I had “NICU on-site” as one of my criteria for picking a hospital, and in hindsight was really glad it was.

The second is that midwives are something of an “alternative medicine” practice, and tend to associate with other such practitioners. So you can quickly run down the line from your midwife with her care and sets of evidence-based practices and standardized blood workups to a referral to a naturopath, herbal preparations, or further down the line to acupuncture or out-right quackery like homeopathy. Yet they do also provide the good care of checking the fetal heart rate, prenatal screening, regular monitoring of the mother’s blood pressure and urine glucose/protein, etc.

The third is a bit of give-and-take: a pro for using a midwife is the patient-centred care, helping you to shape the way your own pregnancy and delivery will go. Whether you want it to be at home or in the hospital, with drugs or without, they will help work with you and develop that plan. But they make a lot of things that are standard-of-care sound optional: for example, a quick vitamin K injection is standard after birth as newborns can sometimes be a little deficient, and it will help them clot. I found that with some of the midwives instead of “we normally do this, but if you really object we can avoid it for you” it was “well, if you want, we can give vitamin K. Totally up to you.” Just the way it was put made me a little afraid they were just a touch too flexible sometimes, and wouldn’t default to the standard-of-care if the new moms were even a little bit apprehensive about interventions.

But those are all very manageable caveats. In the pro column you have a great pregnancy resource who is very unrushed and patient with your endless lists of questions (well, maybe we’re a bit abnormal in the number of questions we can come up with), patient-centred care, totally open to trying to meet your wishes for the birth experience, with a good chance of your primary or secondary midwife actually being the person who will attend the birth. You can page her any time if you have a concern, and usually hear back promptly.

IMHO a midwife-assisted hospital birth is a great way to go, giving you the best of both worlds: good patient-centred care for a calm, natural delivery your way in the majority of cases where that’s possible, while still being able to summon 3 doctors and 7 nurses in an instant for the minority of cases where it’s needed.

Wow, nothing rubs in the cruel realities of old age (or, more precisely, a lifetime of sedentary computer work and the cruel realities of carrying around 40 lbs more than is healthy) like playing flag football against a bunch of 20-year-olds.

I don’t quite know how I got roped into it, but a few friends convinced me to join them in the TSSC flag football league. We didn’t have nearly enough players to form a team on our own, so we signed up as individuals to get randomly put together with some other folks to field a team. The other two guys who showed up to play were good, but unfortunately they were the only ones who showed up — we had to forfeit due to lack of players (though the other team had to forfeit from lack of equipment, so we called it even and played anyway).

There were a few incidents that made me question the whole concept of flag football. The idea is to have a little velcroed-on flag on your body that the other team can rip off to show that you are down, to avoid the brain-damaging tackling of “real” football. The thing is, sometimes you can’t grab the flag, but can grab the player. So at one point one of our guys (one of the younger, fitter ones — obviously not me ;) had two of the opposing players hanging off him, but because they couldn’t manage to grab his flag, he just dragged them across the touch-down line. I had to wonder if that was a kosher goal: on the one hand, they didn’t get his flag, but on the other, they clearly had caught the player. I don’t know, I think if I were faced with the same situation, I’d be sportsmanlike/defeatist and give the other team the benefit of catching me once they started to pull my pants down: yes, you’ve caught me. It’s ok, I won’t get all rules-lawyery about ripping the flag off being the only way to stop the play. The point of the flags is to avoid tackling and the ambiguity of two-hand-touch, and I don’t want to encourage people to tackle someone just to get the flag off at their leisure on the ground.

Speaking of which, I unintentionally knocked someone down, just pushed them the right way below their centre of gravity in the process of grabbing the flag, and down they went. I went down on the next play myself and learned just how deceiving the fake indoor turf is: it feels soft enough under-foot (actually pretty good for running on), but it’s like steel wool to the touch. I’ve got some real nasty turf burn down my leg now, not to mention some sprains and bruises that I’m really feeling today. So I feel pretty bad about (accidentally!) knocking someone down.

In the end, I wasn’t much help to our team: I made a few good plays, but also dropped a catch that was right to me twice, and one time as QB just threw it right into the arms of an opposing player (hey, he was open!). And while I did learn that I suck at football and am out-of-shape, I also found it fun. As much as I hate leaving the house and meeting new people, and as much as I suck at football, in the end I had a good time last night. No one cared that I sucked or gave the other team the ball almost as much as my own, and everyone was friendly and sportsmanlike. I think I’m going to try to sign up for more of these sports things in the spring, since team sports always seem to be a better motivator to go and exercise than just working out is for me.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is creating a new policy to guide physicians in dealing with CAM. There’s a bit of an uproar over the document, even down in the states. There’s a fair bit of good commentary around the web so I won’t get too far into it here, especially since there’s only a few days left on the consultation period. I did agree with the bit about using “their” word, allopathic, right in the title of the document. It framed the discussion all wrong right from the beginning.

My somewhat rhetorical questions for the College on the policy:

• If the College is willing to allow physicians to recommend CAM therapies on weak evidence of a chance of improvement then they should equally allow placebos. If the College currently has an ethical objection to physicians prescribing placebos, it should examine why the same rationale does not apply to CAM.
• The current regulations are quite rigorous for prescribing medications that have good evidence of safety and efficacy but which have not yet received Health Canada approval for use in Canada. Why is it much harder to prescribe a drug that does have some evidence than a CAM therapy that has none?
• The College permits in the policy draft physicians to associate with for-profit CAM clinics, even to offer such services themselves. Why is that not a considered a conflict of interest?

Note that I wasn’t able to quickly dig up the College’s current policy regarding prescribing of placebos, but I doubt it’s looked upon favourably.

Also note that in general I’m not all that hard-line on CAM, but though there may be a place for it, it’s not in the CPSO.

Thank you all for the messages of congratulations. The long slog is over, the thesis is revised and accepted by the faculty, and in the morning I’ll be dropping off the printed copies to be bound into book form (I tried to get it done today but just barely made it up to campus graphic services just as they were locking up).

Some quick notes before I get back on track with the regular blogging:

Yes, it is a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) degree, so I’m “not that kind of doctor”.

No, I didn’t end up meeting my weight goals (which were initially to lose a certain amount of weight, then to simply not gain weight during the final stretch), I ended up gaining about 8 lbs over the last few months. I’ve been really bad on both the exercise and diet fronts: though I started out the spring ok for exercise, when the oppressive heat hit in July I pretty much stopped biking and haven’t really gotten back in the saddle. There have been three times now that I went on road trips with my bike packed in the car, and didn’t even end up taking it out (though to be fair, on one of those the water pump at the cottage broke just as I was on my way out for my ride, and I didn’t much fancy the notion of going for a 20 km ride with no working shower at the end).

For student finances, it worked out almost according to plan. I’m pretty good at being frugal and sticking to a budget, and though it did end up taking longer than I thought (and after my MSc, I really thought I wouldn’t be overly optimistic for my PhD timeline… yeesh) I managed to cope. As you may recall, I had a scholarship for a number of years and was actively saving a portion of that since I expected I wouldn’t finish by the time the scholarship ran out. Most of that savings I invested, and most of that into dividend payers, so in this later phase I was using the dividend income to help make ends meet when departmental minimum funding wasn’t enough to pay the bills (well, it was enough to pay the rent and food bill, but not the internet, phone, insurance, or tuition bills). I did get surprised by a few mis-calculations, the most recent being figuring when my last stipend would be paid out: I knew June was the last month I was getting paid for, but I thought my pay was arriving the following month, so that I could count on money arriving in July — it turns out I had my pay cycle wrong and the money I got in June [which I thought was for May, etc.] was the last I got. So that lead to an even tighter belt than I thought, but I suppose that’s what emergency funds, lines of credit, and investments are for. I picked up a bit of contract work in July, and I didn’t realistically expect to be paid for it until August, but here we are at the end of August and I still have no idea when I’ll be paid. Wayfare’s in much the same situation, I think she just got her paycheque for work done in May.

So right now I’m into full-on defer everything mode. I know that I’ll eventually get paid again, but until then I’m trying to defer as many expenses as possible, and tapping my non-traditional emergency funds like reward points to pay for things like groceries and gas where possible. I normally keep a large stockpile of food on hand (I suppose I have my mom to thank for that), and aside from seeking some variety and fresh foods, I could probably go 3 weeks without having to go grocery shopping. So I’m going to eat through some of that cache. I wore a suit for my lecture and defence (yes, I own a suit now, crazy!), but I think it can wait a few more weeks to be dry-cleaned. My shoes have holes in them (not serious ones, I’ve just worn through the lining near the heel so the plastic heel cup is showing on the inside), but they still work and soon enough I can switch to my winter boots which are in good shape.

I’m really good at procrastination.

As to where I’ve been for the last week: well, I didn’t have that many revisions to make, but there were a few, and I only had a week or so to make them. Otherwise I’ve largely been catching up on half a lifetime of sleep deprivation and spending time away from the internet. I got a kobo reader as a graduation gift (which I’ll review shortly) and picked up the next few books in the George RR Martin Song of Ice and Fire series, and they are not short books. I’ve already finished the second one and have moved on to Storm of Swords. It’s still technically summer, so I can make some progress on that summer reading list!

Now that I’m done my PhD what comes next for Dr. Potato? The clever-boots answer I came up with was “Dieting. Definitely dieting.” Short-term, I’m going to be doing some more research work for the next few months. After that, I don’t know yet. I’m looking for jobs, but seem to have more of a geographic limitation than an occupational one: I’m open to private sector R&D, academia, or may even try a turn at finance or pure teaching/lecturing. I’ll just have to see what opportunities present themselves.

There was a recent CBC Marketplace episode on homeopathy, in particular, the bizarre decision by the Ontario government to regulate some homeopathic preparations. I have to agree with the hosts of the show that this is a dangerous move by the government, as it may lend credibility to a practice that is void of any evidence of efficacy. For those unaware of what homeopathy is, it’s an old belief that if an agent does something (e.g.: arsenic is a poison that can lead to gastrointestinal and liver issues), then a dilute solution of that something does the opposite (e.g.: a homeopathic preparation of diluted arsenic is given for gastrointestinal issues). However, homeopathy has never been shown to do anything, and the theory and dilutions were developed before key advances in our understanding of molecular chemistry: many homeopathic tinctures are diluted so much they contain zero molecules of the supposed original substance. I had long heard about British evidence-based medicine, skeptics, and science advocates in general battling against homeopaths in the UK, but this Marketplace episode was the first time I found out that there was any homeopathic activity here in Canada. I found that surprising, as unlike other controversial alternative therapies (e.g.: herbal/”natural”, high-dose vitamins, chiropractic), homeopathy is a whole new level of nonsense. There’s literally no there there. It’s not that the evidence is weak, it’s that there’s no evidence, and no rational theory suggesting any efficacy. Homeopathy is completely, utterly, without merit.

I wrote to my MPP & Minister of Health and Long-Term Care Deb Matthews with one simple question: is this a program that is a cost centre for the government, or does it generate revenue by charging fees to the homeopaths? This is a relevant question, as we must control health care costs in our province, and we can not afford to waste money “regulating” sugar water.

I hope that the government is at least making money off the attempt, because I do believe that certifying in any way a homeopathic preparation does, in the eyes of the lay public, lend an air of credibility to the woo-woo. It’s been over a month, and I haven’t heard back on that yet. I got a response from one of her staffers that I would hear back later, but after several weeks with no response I re-sent my question. It’s been another few weeks and still no response.

“Dr. Joshua Tepper: People are choosing health care, people are voting with their feet, if you will.”

You know what else people are voting with their feet for? Marijuana. People who know me know that I am not a user. I despise the weed, and don’t think really it should be legalized (though to be fair, cigarettes should be criminalized). But you know what? I bet that there are way more users of pot than there are of homeopathy in Ontario. And there is much better evidence that pot might actually help a few medical conditions! So I don’t see any reason for this kind of “voting with their feet” logic for homeopathy but not for marijuana.

Something else millions of Ontarians are voting with their feet for is vision and dental care. The government’s never paid for dental care, and cut regular eye check-ups out of OHIP coverage years ago, yet somehow has the money and energy to worry itself about homeopathy?

Ugh.

I’m pretty miserably sick here. Sore throat, cough, fever, and vile fluids being produced all over the place. I think the combination of thesis stress and digging out from over a meter of snow just did me in.

My cache of drugs was pretty low to be heading in to a major illness. In particular, I was just about out of advil; I had to ration them yesterday so that I’d still have one to take this morning to get me out the door to the pharmacy.

On the bright side, I was going through the Pharma Plus flyer, and just about everything I wanted was on sale. Advil, vitamins, mouthwash, nyquil, and cold-fx all had pretty substantial sales on. Plus, it was a big bonus airmiles promotion if I spent $50 or more (which wouldn’t be hard to hit with all the stuff on my list). There was even a 1-day sale on 7-up ($2.22 per 6-pack of bottles! awesome!) today. I didn’t feel like driving, especially since we got another dusting of snow last night, and that would involve sweeping the car off. The Pharma Plus is only like 3 blocks away, so I walked.

And when I got there, there was no sale tag out for the Advil, just one of the “switch to the store brand and save X” tags. I figured I must have remembered the flyer wrong, put some store brand ibuprofen in the cart, and moved on… but the vitamins had no sale tag either. Nor did the mouthwash. The toblerone did, but not the door-crasher one-day sale price, and the 7-up wasn’t even available in the bottles. Something was definitely wrong, so I went to the front of the store where the flyers usually are to double-check (maybe I had the effective day wrong? Maybe I dreamed it all in my fever?), and there were no flyers. There wasn’t even that tray where they usually sit. I asked the cashier for a flyer, and he said they’re not a flyer store.

What? I know they were a flyer store just a few months ago, the last time I was there. How can they not be a flyer store? Can they do that, opt to use the Pharma Plus name and everything but then not follow their flyer? And also, if they’re not a flyer store, why is Pharma Plus sending a flyer to my house? The next closest store is 4 km away, and I have to pass by three Shoppers Drug Marts (and this Pharma Plus) to get there. Not a very effective use of the advertising budget…

I have to say though that given the amount of snow that was dumped on London, the city has done a decent job at cleaning up the sidewalks. This is particularly remarkable because the city usually does a terrible job at keeping the sidewalks free of snow — the sidewalk ploughs seem to take a day or two before they come around, and by that time the snow has been packed down into an irregular icy surface by the passage of what pedestrians there are, and that’s nigh-impossible to walk on. The one issue is that at many intersections the sidewalk ploughs went by first, and now the street ploughs have put up an icy barrier for pedestrians to hop over. Nothing new to anyone out there, I’m sure, but with the amount of snow we have, those ice dams mean that we’re going to have some epic meltwater ponds forming soon…

It’s my 800th post! I was trying to think of ways of celebrating this arbitrary milestone, but they all involved the chocolate bar sale at RCSS this week, which means I don’t have very good news for my diet update this week. Well, actually, it’s not all bad. I’ve been much better about my regular meals, even having salad for lunch, much to the very vocal shock and surprise of my coworkers. It’s just that I’ve also been grinding away at analysis for 10-12 hours a day for the last two weeks or so, and that has involved a lot of snacking. Worse yet, I haven’t done much at all in the way of exercise through all this, and the weather’s not getting any better.

The housing bubble seemed to crack into the media’s attention this week, with numerous stories on the matter, thanks in part to some attention from reports from CCPA, Howe, the OECD, and TD.

One important distinction to make is that the US was not the only country to have a housing bubble collapse in the last few years: most of Europe did as well. So if some analyst lays out the reasons why we won’t have a “US-style collapse” here, well, that’s just playing with semantics. We could have a UK-style collapse. Or a Spanish one. Or our very own flavour. Yes, due to how our lending is set up we’re less likely to have “waves” of defaults, but that’s a fine point. The housing market in the US was not hunky-dory save for the defaults (and we didn’t really see them in our 1989 crash either). The fact is that housing is too expensive, and it will come down. There’s still plenty of debate about how quickly that will happen, and even how far it will come, and I will vigorously debate that the answers are “over the next 3-5 years” and “far enough that you don’t want to buy now” — but those are opinions vs facts. While we may not have defaults accelerating the downward cycle, we do have the experience of watching the rest of the world burn. Once it’s common knowledge that yes, our house is on fire too, I don’t think people will dick around before heading for the exits, which will help speed the process along.

In the US, Barry Ritholtz points out that the spin from the NAR did not help anything. Something to keep in mind when reading CREA/TREB releases!

David Fleming had a look at his new condo at West Side Lofts, and was not impressed. An important reminder that pre-construction is supposed to sell at a significant discount because of the risks inherent in buying something sight-unseen. Plus of course the delays, and the risk the market could move against you.

An engineering student did a cross-Canada trip in an electric car he built himself! Should (slightly) help put people’s minds at ease about range anxiety and charging infrastructure, at least a little bit.

Michael James comments on an article about using “robot traders” to move against the herd and stabilize markets. He asks the same question that popped into my mind when I first saw it on Larry McDonald’s blog — who’ll pay for all of that trading, especially if the positions lose money for years at a time?

John Hempton of Bronte Capital had an interesting post about doing due diligence on an internet travel booking company in China. It’s a long post, but a good read on some basic ways to check up on a company you may be interested in. He came to the conclusion that the company was worth shorting, which raised something of a shitstorm — UTA was the biggest decliner on the NYSE the day after the blog post. There are two followup posts as well.

I’ve long been a browser tab addict with Firefox, opening all kinds of links in new tabs to follow-up on later. I usually use the CTRL-click shortcut to have a link open in a new tab, rather than right-clicking, then going to “open in new tab”. However, Netbug just pointed out that clicking with the middle mouse button (on most mice, that’s clicking your scroll wheel) also does the trick. Efficiency!

And finally, it’s a new school year, which generally means very little to the full-time grad student. However, it did mean the replaying of our annual introduction to the department for the new students, including laying out the details on tuition support and stipends/scholarships. Which has resumed a discussion that is near and dear to my heart: Year X & funding. Funding for students is only guaranteed out to 5 years for PhD students (4 for those who already have a MSc). However, the average degree takes something more like 7 years — indeed, just finding information on the actual statistics for the time to complete a degree is proving to be nearly impossible. If you’ve got any good data on these issues (even just at the departmental level at whatever university you’re at) please share! There was also some brief talk on the fact that the funding slide was exactly the same as the one I saw when I first arrived here [redacted] years ago, which was old even then. In over a decade there have been no cost-of-living adjustments to the stipends grad students get, even though the university can’t be ignorant of inflation, as tuition has gone up 35% in that time.

I’ve been super busy lately, and I’ve shifted my leisure habits from blogging, writing, and finance lately to playing StarCraft and fiddling with Flash animations (which had even fewer views than I had suspected, and zero comments… I guess I only find myself funny because I’m sleep deprived?).

Anyhow, this picture should give you an idea of how the diet has been going this week:

Ok, actually it wasn’t all that bad. I did get back on the bike, and aside from the last day of cookies (and tomorrow’s chocolate party), I have been pretty good with the diet. I caught up on my sleep over the weekend, which also helped a lot with feeling better and getting a workout in. However, according to my “aggressive yet totally doable thesis timeline” I was supposed to defend my thesis last week. As you have not seen a post to that effect (or even that I’ve finished the first draft of my thesis), you know that I didn’t defend my thesis last week. That made me sad, and cookies are good friends when you’re in your little box of sadness.

Despite the recent spate of results coming out of so many companies, I haven’t had time to go over any of them in any kind of detail, and haven’t listened to a single conference call this quarter. So I’m not really in much of a position to come up with any good investing posts, but that won’t stop me from spewing out a few half-baked thoughts in this quasi-weekly roundup:

BP: They capped the well, the stock recovered very nicely from the bottom… and then the stock went down and down and down again. I have no idea why. I’m ambivalent on it at this price: it’s not cheap enough to be interesting for me to buy more, but especially with the well capped so the liability is no longer infinite, I wouldn’t want to bail at this point…

DR.UN: Medical Facilities is a neat little income trust that I flagged a few months ago as one to watch for the next quarter or two to see how things go. They got really cheap there for a while, yielding up around 15% (which would likely become a ~11% dividend after conversion). I skimmed their quarterly release and things looked ok — not great, but ok — but I didn’t have time to really read it in detail. They’ve since gone up about 10%, and I’m no longer sure how much of the value is there…

The Banks: the Canadian housing market looks like it’s finally following the rest of the world back down to reality. Now, the Canadian banks have very little risk of complete loss associated with that event, but I doubt very much that even the CMHC makes the risk zero. AFAIK, they will at the very least face a reduction in their mortgage portfolios as the number of Canadian homeowners follows the American trajectory from ~69% back to the historical ~64%, and the sizes of those associated loans shrink. Once the downturn gets into full swing, they’ll probably have a few bad quarters/years until things shake out. So even though they already are starting to look cheap again, I’ve been sitting on my hands on the assumption that they’ll get cheaper in the next few years. Unfortunately, I suppose that could be described as fruitless market timing, and that this idea is already baked into the prices… that said I do still have some exposure to Canadian banks (I still hold TD), though I think I’m slightly underweight compared to the index.

Conversely, the American banks may have hit bottom already. BAC is making the top picks of several analysts, but I haven’t had time to do any research to see if it might be fore me… likewise Manulife has been getting cheaper by the day, yet again, I can’t say yet if it’s cheap enough. With these though, I’m not sure I’d ever be able to — these entities are just so big, with so many moving parts and black boxes, I don’t think I could ever fully get my head around them with the skills and tools I have at my disposal right now.

Links:

An interesting article on how scarce helium is on our planet, and how a bone-headed move by the US government is causing a large part of our reserves to be sold off at rock-bottom prices, making helium too cheap to bother recycling… for now. To be fair, we can manufacture helium from nuclear processes, but not in large quantities, and certainly not cheaply.

Also, Netbug has relaunched his blog, with a slightly new address.

I’ve had about 5 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours as I try to cram out (at the last minute, of course) some papers for an upcoming conference. It’s been a nightmare because, amongst other reasons, the ridiculous copyright policy of the conference means that we have to submit papers that are different enough from what we usually write that we can still have freedom to use our own work elsewhere. It’s hard enough to hammer out a paper in the first place, then to have to try to do it in the literary equivalent of a funny accent…

Anyhow, I’ve been battling with yet another nasty case of writer’s block — something that seems to hit me far too severely when it comes to my professional writing. I think Wayfare hit the issue on the head: I worry too much about how the work will be received for professional stuff and just lock up, whereas on my pseudo-anonymous blog I can just hammer away at the keyboard and not even worry about proof reading since I don’t have that much invested in it. Nothing to do but just try to get over it. In the meantime, Netbug suggested I take a quick break and put up at least a Tater’s Takes post, so here you go.

On the health/diet front, I found out that my scale got miscalibrated somewhere along the way. I’m not sure when it happened, but it was reading high by 3-4 pounds, which means I’ve really only gained about a pound from when I started. Still, wrong direction, but not quite as bad as I had thought. The last week was decent but not great: I’ve been watching what I eat more, but still had a few doughnuts at work through the week. I’ve started writing down my meal plan for a ~3 day period, and have been sticking to it reasonably well, and including lots of healthy stuff like vegetables and oatmeal, so that’s been good. I only had two good long bikerides in the week, but considering the week I’ve had, that’s pretty good (I plan on retrying the 36 km trip around Fanshawe Lake once these stupid stupid stupid papers are in).

“Today” though has been hell on the diet: I’ve resorted to undergrad cram tactics, pounding down full-sugar Coke & Red Bull and eating nothing but junk food to burn through the night. 3940 calories in the last 24 hour period (I don’t know what I consider a “day” anymore — best to try to stick to the subjective view of time the rest of you hold), which is simply not an efficient way to produce written words. As soon as the caffeine starts to wear off, I’m right into the head-bobbing vertigo stage of sleep deprivation, so I’m really hoping these stupid papers get finished soon.

In the news, BP’s latest cap attempt actually appears to be working. The stock shot up, then slid back down on perhaps fears that the shutting-in of the oil may have put too much pressure on the parts of the well below the ocean floor, causing oil to seep out (in a way that could be very difficult to control).

Also finance-related, a quick note that I sold my H&R REIT yesterday. Thanks to falling behind on my thesis and staying a grad student longer than my scholarship said I should I know that I’ll need to be raising cash, and also H&R is starting to look fully valued to me, so out it goes. Again, this isn’t a case of not liking the company, just thinking that the price was getting high enough…

I was going to look into the new Ontario “eco fee” tax this weekend and blog about it, but it looks like the negative publicity and poor roll-out has lead to it being canned… for now.

After running headlong into Bell’s very restrictive 25 GB data cap in May, I had to complain to any that would hear me that the $2/GB charge was very obviously excessive, and in no way actually reflected the incremental cost of that data usage. Plus, of course, the comparison to Rogers’ slightly more generous 60 GB cap (and 5 years ago the cap was also 60 GB, long before most users started watching videos on the internet, or Bell/Rogers themselves started rolling out video-on-demand portals). Netbug sent along an article that looks at this issue for US ISPs and concludes that indeed, most of the cost structure is composed of fixed-cost infrastructure type spending, and there’s no support in the ISPs’ business model for the caps and data charges that have been rolled out. Congestion issues are also unlikely to be the reason for the fees, since if congestion at peak times was the issue, the ISPs should instead implement time-of-use charges.