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Witztum et al. is the primary source behind the Bible Code. As far as I can tell it has since been refuted by reproducing similar results from other works of literature. Rips, the main author, is a distinguished mathematician but no statistician. The referees chosen by Statistical Science were though, and they’d have preferred to be able to reject the manuscript but could not find a reason to do so. (more…)
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There are two new articles on antibiotic abuse. Negishi confirms the rationale behind giving antibiotics for viral infections. Viral infection does indeed suppress the immune reaction against bacteria. By describing the mechanism Negishi et al. also open the way towards a more sensible treatment. Abt et al. demonstrate yet another downside of antibiotics, killing beneficial gut flora also impairs the antiviral immune reaction. (more…)
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While seemingly confirming theory Fujita et al.’s result is decidedly fishy.
As a well-off mother experiences less conflict between offspring benefit and cost to herself and as raising nutritional value beyond the optimum confers no benefit, we expect the sex difference to be low at high SES and high at low SES, contrary to the reported result.
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Lager & Torssander report another spurious non-result from the humanities posing as science. In their table 3 they test for 42 outcomes and from the text another 84 (age under 40 and whole group) are untabulated. Out of these 126 tests 8, i.e. 1 in 16 come out as barely significant, meaning with a probability of 1 in 20 for occurring purely by chance. So what exactly is it they are reporting here and what did the referees do in their peer-review?
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Concerning the various papers by McIntyre & McKitrick and McShane & Wyner I note:
– In no way do they invalidate climate reconstruction from proxies as such, their issues are solely with methods used in aggregating a huge number of proxies.
– As the models are trained on a short time span exhibiting two steep rises, (more…)
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Berna together with Carmody 2011 provide new support for Wrangham’s disputed fire hypothesis.
Yong has another take on the decline and fall of the empire of science (more…)
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As long as science is a career not a vocation (and in many subjects outside of engineering and physics the only career), that career is mostly furthered by the number of publications, and publication favours positive results over correct ones, new results over replicated and established ones, clear-cut results over ambiguous ones, and precise results over meaningful ones, I see no solution to the problem of science. (more…)
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Borneman is little more than a credulous wall of verbosity. What stands out though is his completely uncritical retelling of the “Juliet” episode. It begins with a brother, who seeing he was only going to return from an orphanage six months later (more…)
