What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
The BBC reports (shockingly), that the journal Nature is going to begin requiring a reproducibility checklist of authors, based on a survey performed last year where at least 70% of respondents (self-selected, of course) indicated that they were unable to reproduce expected results. As the ability to replicate studies is what allows science to demonstrate meaningfulness and continue moving the body of knowledge forward, it is surprising that it has taken this long for top of the line journals to more strongly encourage replication to establish validity.
The Sound Of Settled Science
With the benefit of hindsight, the story of the amyloid hypothesis will be written either as one where scientists soldiered on despite setbacks, or one where a wrong idea derailed a field for 25 years. And the field of Alzheimer’s research is no stranger to ideas inflated, abandoned, and sometimes resurrected.
The Sound Of Settled Science
The Vikings – Newly discovered evidence is upending our understanding of how early settlers made a life on the island — and why they suddenly disappeared
Amid that calamity, so the story goes, Greenland’s Vikings–numbering 5,000 at their peak–never gave up their old ways. They failed to learn from the Inuit, who arrived in northern Greenland a century or two after the Vikings landed in the south. They kept their livestock, and when their animals starved, so did they. The more flexible Inuit, with a culture focused on hunting marine mammals, thrived.
That is what archaeologists believed until a few years ago.
Well, it did fit a convenient narrative.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Earth Has a New Continent Called ‘Zealandia’, Study Reveals …
Reader Tips
The McGurk Effect.
Tips thread open.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Forget what you’ve learned – scientists just created a stable helium compound
The Sound Of Settled Science
TOO MUCH WINNING: Milky Way galaxy is being pushed across the universe
The Sound Of Settled Science
Saccorhytus Michaelmooreius: The researchers were unable to find any evidence that the animal had an anus, which suggests that it consumed food and excreted from the same orifice.
h/t AK
The Sound of Settled Science
Fukushima residents exposed to far less radiation than thought:
Citizen science usually isn’t this personal. In 2011, roughly 65,000 Japanese citizens living near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant started measuring their own radiation exposure in the wake of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. That’s because no one, not even experts, knew how accurate the traditional method of estimating dosage–taking readings from aircraft hundreds of meters above the ground–really was…
The scientists concluded that actual radiation doses were roughly 15% of what the helicopters were measuring, scaled to ground level, they reported last month in the Journal of Radiological Protection. That’s four times less radiation than what the Japanese government was previously assuming.
Anti-nuclear activists are reportedly devastated at the results.
Warmest year on record™
It isn’t until the bottom of this article that you learn why the rest is bogus.
Understanding the difference in trends between the surface temperature data sets and the satellite data sets of atmospheric temperature remains an outstanding challenge for scientists.
And journalists.
Can we regrow a limb yet?
Canadian Innovation in Medicine.
Via NWC
Solid science built this house of cards.
But the whole does not equal the value of the pieces. Kinda what we’ve been saying for a decade or more.
The paper discusses the phenomenal amount of adjustment that has been applied to the models in order to get them to produce what the scientists called an “anticipated acceptable range” of future warming. Among modelers, this is known as “tuning” an experiment in order to get a desired answer.
Climate religion has for too long relied on models guesstimating the known unknowns and hypothesizing unknown unknowns.
In the various mailing lists that make up the forums of debate in the computer world in order to express displeasure with anothers work we usually just write something like, “Your solution sucks because a,b,c.” Apparently the American Meteorological Society needs 45 pages to do the same thing. Abstract with a link to the preliminary draft PDF on that page.
The Sound Of Settled Science
“Green Cheesers” still unconvinced: Study crashes main Moon-formation theory (h/t Paul)
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Greenland Glaciers
Greenland’s ice sheet kicked off 2017 gaining about eight gigatons of snow and ice, which is well above what’s usually added to the ice sheet Jan. 1 for the last 24 years, according to Danish meteorologists.
In fact, Greenland’s ice sheet has been gaining ice and snow at a rate not seen in years based on Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) data. DMI reports the Greenland ice sheet’s “mass surface budget” has been growing significantly since October.
Dr. Judith Curry
… has resigned her tenured position at Georgia Tech.
A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.
How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide (I have worked through these issues with a number of skeptical young scientists).
The Sound Of Settled Sinking
An Irish journalist claims in a new documentary that fire, not ice, was responsible for the most famous nautical disaster of all time.
Senan Molony, a newspaper editor and large-boat enthusiast, says newly unearthed photos suggest a fire inside the Titanic’s coal room was much more serious than anyone previously believed.
In Titanic: The New Evidence, which aired Sunday in Britain, Molony claims the flames, which were burning before the ocean liner even left Europe, weakened the ship’s hull from the inside out.
By the time the boat reached the waters off Newfoundland, its skin was so brittle, Molony believes, that even a minor collision could have caused it to tear.
Here’s the Youtube version. h/t Melonhead
“What have you done to Al Gore? I am told I have to fire you.”
An interview with physicist William Happer. (h/t Don)
So Much Winning!
Wisconsin’s state agency that oversees environmental regulation recently removed language from its webpage on the Great Lakes that says humans and greenhouse gases are the main cause of climate chang e.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources now contends the subject is a matter of scientific debate.
The department made the changes Dec.21, striking out whole sentences attributing global warming to human activities and rising levels of carbon dioxide.
Those state governors now have a friend in the White House.
h/t Vicki
The Sound Of Settled Science
Charles Darwin ushered in a new era of thinking where change was expected and necessary. Our species as are all others, is the product of ongoing environmental change and adaption to varying conditions; the constancy of change. In the last 15 years or so however, we have seemingly reverted to a pre-Darwinian mode of a fixed ‘immutable Earth’ where any change beyond some sort of ‘norm’ is seen in some quarters as unnatural, threatening and due to our activities, usually with the proviso of needing ‘to act now to save the planet.’ Honest scientific discourse and debate is often rendered impossible in the face of the ‘new catastrophism.’
A great read, and worthy of sharing.