Dan’s Papers April 1, 2011 danspapers.com Page 21
Right Then,Wrong Now An Unexpected Change in Identical Scientific Study Results By Dan Rattiner Last week, a journal called the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study about coffee. The more coffee a day you drink, up to four cups, the lower your odds of getting heart disease. But there’s a catch. You have to be a woman. Men get no benefit from drinking up to four cups a day. Nobody of either sex gets a benefit of drinking more cups per day. The study was quite thorough. The researchers, at a university in Britain, studied the health of 84,000 women and 42,000 men during a 20-year period, from 1984 to 2004. The results were irrefutable. One cup of coffee was beneficial, that is, if you were a woman, and at
four cups per day the benefits leveled off at 25% reduction in heart disease in later life. This study has subsequently been published in many newspapers worldwide as well as on television news broadcasts and on the Internet. Women must be running for the Starbucks instead of the Exercise Studio. I just finished reading a long article in the December 13, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine by Jonah Lehrer about studies such as these. It reported an alarming situation. After a year or more goes by and the word goes out about what these highly verifiable studies can teach us, other scientists will conduct new studies using the same parameters to “confirm” what
the earlier study has uncovered. And a very strange thing happens. For example, in the early 1980s, a young graduate student at the University of Washington published a study about memory and language. It became famous. And so did its author, Jonathan Schooler. Schooler asked subjects to look at photographs of 10 faces in order to try to remember, after they looked at them, which names went with the different faces. For five of them, Schooler asked them to describe the faces. For the other five, he just had them look at them. The results were quite astonishing. The ones he asked the sub(continued on next page)
SAG HARBOR’S MORPURGO HOUSE WAS SOLD? By Dan Rattiner For about 10 years, between 1998 and 2008, two elderly sisters, Annselm and Helga Morpurgo, famously battled with one another about a mansion they inherited from their late father in downtown Sag Harbor. Both of them revered the memory of their father, a Europeanborn physician who had both his offices and his home in the mansion. Both wanted to perpetuate the sort of thing he did, which was welcome all comers to what he referred to as the Savant Garde Institute. And both wanted nothing to do with one another, although one was sweet and sorrowful about that, and the other was firm and outraged about that. It also did not help that one of them sometimes went by the name Artemis Smith.
This battle was kind of wearing on the village, for, besides the obvious, two other reasons. One was that while one locked the other out or the other send the first one packing, the house was falling into a disreputable state. Pretty soon when the heat and water failed, certain parts of it became unlivable, except perhaps by feral cats. Neither sister had any money, just their stake in the house. The other reason all this was wearing on the village was that the mansion almost directly abutted the back end of the village’s library, which at its front end, faced directly out across Main Street to the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum. The library needed to expand. They offered to buy the Morpurgo House so they could expand backwards. One would say yes, the other
would say no. Then it would be the other way around. Around 2002, the library gave up on trying to expand to the Morpurgo property. Instead, they decided, they’d move away completely, building an entirely new facility a mile out of town in Mashashimuet Park. A referendum was held. The village voted against that plan. This whole matter with the Morpurgos seemed to finally come to an end in 2004 when the two sisters agreed on something, which was that they would sell the place at an auction. The auction was held on the front steps of a local bank. The upset price was $4 million. When their attorney Stephen Grossman started the bidding no hands went up. And so everyone went home. In 2007, though, finally, the matter did come to (continued on page 24)