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Frolich fails to ask the main question: Will triggering small and nearly imperceptible earthquakes suppress big and devastating ones or will they bring them about?
Statins very effectively control a symptom. Rahimi and Rosendaal provide another example of them not controlling the illness these symptoms strongly correlate with. (more…)
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Finally somebody – Trimmer et al. – offers a possible explanation for the most important problem in medicine. The question here is not why a placebo induces the body to launch a full immune response but rather why an impairing infection without the placebo does not. Trimmer’s answer is the costliness of the immune effort, which according to circumstances may be higher than the cost of enduring the infection. (more…)
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In Gillen-O’Neel we find yet another study that could be relevant if it weren’t useless. Full of statistical mumbo-jumbo and short on content it lacks even a single data point or even error bar in its two figures. This is cargo cult not even pretending to be science. At least in Cologne psychology is not placed among the sciences but grouped with music and knitting where it belongs. (more…)
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Nature has another comment about science fraud. This relentless barrage of verbosity is beginning to look like a smoke screen, hiding, at best, nothing being done. Looking more closely at Macilwain we find that there is. The chosen answer seems to be building up yet another tier of bureaucracy to hamper academic science. The one thing not done is research itself. Every primary school textbook still carries the definition of science as being about reproducibility and reproduction, but just that’s what’s not done anymore. (more…)
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Nature is really getting their bit between the teeth about the deluge of junk clotting up the journals with an editorial and a comment, ganging up on geneticists this time. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof (Carl Sagan) and should be tested, not cited. Katz 1938 is one of the sensational new discoveries my father shot down in both his diploma and doctoral theses – was able to shoot down because in his time, the early fifties, replicating others’ published results was still seen as worth graduate students’ time and university departments’ limited funds. (more…)
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Shtulman & Valcarcel again highlight the importance of good primary and kindergarden education. Early acquired misconceptions will never be quite lost and still hamper highly educated adults. Typically just these professions recruit from students bad at and afraid of STEM subjects. (more…)
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Halberda is another example, of how a statistically significant result is not at odds with it being completely meaningless. In his animated GIFs the ranges for the different mathematical aptitudes overlap nearly totally, the predictive value of his result is essentially nil.
Zorzi on the other hand is helpful, relevant, (more…)
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Simonsohn makes a pertinent point about scientific fraud. Journals should admit their responsibility and do something about it instead of falsely framing themselves as the innocent victims.
All secondary reports, Schoeninger included, try to frame Henry’s result in terms of human ancestors. I can’t see why. (more…)
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Eisenberg is a prime example of pure chartmanship. The only diagrams he shows are of the effect he does not discuss (and following the rule “if you caint see it, it aint there” these are meaningless) and his reported R2 is consistently below 0.05, i.e. pure noise. His largest possible effect in figure 2 is barely one fifth of the densely packed inner area of the scatter in figure 1 and neither variance nor standard error are given. (more…)
