Forbidden science: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences (2:45 hours)

Eye candy.

Journals were historically important in disseminating work and in organising peer review, feedback and curation. These are important functions and the hard work that we put into them is not wasted, but it is inefficient. We do not need journals as they exist now. With preprint servers, publication and dissemination is a solved problem. There are already multiple solutions for post-publication peer review and paper recommendation, and there are many active projects exploring alternatives. We need to find a way to maintain the good things about the current system while getting rid of the harmful aspects.

I am, therefore, resigning from all my editorial roles.

He sounds nice.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla explains Pfizer's new tech to Davos crowd: "ingestible pills" – a pill with a tiny chip that send a wireless signal to relevant authorities when the pharmaceutical has been digested. "Imagine the compliance," he says pic.twitter.com/uYapKJGDJx

— Jeremy Loffredo (@loffredojeremy) May 20, 2022

The case was cold for about a decade…

… until Sergeant Mike White, in Norwalk, began looking into the murder. White wondered if he could connect the bedsheets to what he believed might have been the murder weapon: a Craftsman breaker bar—a heavy tool with a long handle, used to unscrew tight bolts—that had been found in a car that James Parsons had once owned. White approached the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office, in Cleveland. The technicians there examined the bedsheets and the tool, which had no traces of blood on it, and said they could not conclusively rule out the breaker bar as the murder weapon or connect it to the crime.

White then brought the matter to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, where the case was assigned to a forensic scientist named G. Michele Yezzo, a bloodstain specialist. Yezzo proved to be more helpful. She believed she could make out a letter N, consistent with the appearance of the same letter in the word Craftsman on the breaker bar, imprinted on a bedsheet. She also believed that some stains on the victim’s nightgown—which are not easy to decipher—appeared to be similar in shape to the head area of the bar. She sprayed a chemical on the bedsheet and the nightgown to enhance the stains and raise any other impressions. As she watched, more detail emerged. She later testified that she was able to see “individualizing characteristics”—marks seemingly unique to that breaker bar—on the nightgown. She also testified that the letter S rose to the surface of the bedsheet—likewise consistent with the appearance of that letter in the word Craftsman. But Yezzo failed to photograph the newly visible image, and it faded. Moreover, the chemical process used to bring out the bloodstain markings—all of them, on both the bedsheet and the nightgown—made replication by the defense impossible. When asked, years later, why she had failed to photograph what she said she’d seen on the enhanced bedsheet, Yezzo replied, “This is one time that I didn’t manage to get it soon enough.” She added: “Operator error.”