107 cancer papers retracted due to peer review fraud.
The Sound Of Settled Science
While nearly 90 percent of Americans think people have unique learning styles — the best known are labeled auditory, visual, and kinesthetic — cognitive research has steadily debunked the idea over time. To mark Brain Awareness Week this month, 30 internationally respected neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators issued a public letter asking teachers to stop wasting time with it.
The Sound Of Settled Science
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.
Reader Tips
The McGurk Effect.
Tips thread open.
The Sound Of Settled Science
TOO MUCH WINNING: Milky Way galaxy is being pushed across the universe
Can we regrow a limb yet?
Canadian Innovation in Medicine.
Via NWC
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).
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
Hoss Cartwright, a former editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Innovations and Research, had a good excuse for missing the 5th World Congress on Virology last year: He doesn’t exist. Burkhard Morgenstern, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Gottingen, dreamt him up, and built a nice little scientific career for him. He wrote Cartwright a Curriculum Vitae, describing his doctorate in Studies of Dunnowhat, his rigorous postdoctoral work at Some Shitty Place in the Middle of Nowhere, and his experience as Senior Cattle Manager at the Ponderosa Institute for Bovine Research. Cartwright never published a single research paper, but he was appointed to the editorial boards of five journals…
The Sound Of Settled Science
The Inevitable Evolution of Bad Science
Over time, and across many simulations, the virtual labs inexorably slid towards less effort, poorer methods, and almost entirely unreliable results. And here’s the important thing: Unlike the hypothetical researcher I conjured up earlier, none of these simulated scientists are actively trying to cheat. They used no strategy, and they behaved with integrity. And yet, the community naturally slid towards poorer methods. What the model shows is that a world that rewards scientists for publications above all else–a world not unlike this one–naturally selects for weak science.
h/t Jean
Watch Bacteria Evolve
This Is Awkward
Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5% false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.
Oops.
“Fuck off, Fascist”
Alex Epstein responds to Massachussettes attorney general’s subpoena for private or confidential correspondence.
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
Social Justice Warriors Declare Battle On Colleague For Exposing Their ‘Research’
The Sound Of Settled Science
A group of prominent scientists have united for an odd quest: to reduce funding for science education. They’ve joined with environmental groups and progressive activists to demand that hundreds of museums of science and natural history “cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation,” which means rejecting donations or investment dividends from anyone who doesn’t meet their standard of purity.
h/t Terry
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
The paper, “Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-)Being-Queer,” attributed to Benedetta Tripodi of the Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza in Romania, is apparently the work of two academics, who submitted the absurd article to Badiou Studies to expose its lack of rigor in accepting papers.
Just a quick look at some of the text of the fake paper exposes its peculiarities.
Via Powerline.
Heavy Metal
Armor-piercing bullets meet their match.
Published This Month In The Journal Of The Blindingly Obvious
What would we do without field studies? A field study has suggested that plants growing in cool temperate regions respond well to milder temperatures.
The Lesser Known Eisenhower Quote
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” *
Global Warming and the Irrelevance of Science – an essay by Richard Lindzen..
This Is The Time At SDA When We Juxtapose!
State of the Union, January 12th, 2016 – Sixty years ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny Sputnik was up there. We didn’t argue about the science, or shrink our research and development budget.
State of the Science, January 12th, 2016 – Webbed feet, cat’s eyes and gills: Features are just some that humans could evolve to have to deal with a ‘water world’ due to global warming