First the link to this week’s complete list.
Crocker makes some pertinent points but completely ignores the facts starting to come out. From Callaway and Vogel of last week it becomes clear, there was more than one warning sign in his data that ought to have aroused suspicion. They didn’t. The scientific method relying on reproducibility and reproduction has completely failed here. Crocker may be right in recommending the colleagues telling on Stapel, but this is not what science is about.
Quite aside from quakes, Stein in Monastersky makes some important points about risk avoidance in general. For about six months after any spectacular or spectacularly failed act of Terrorism enormous effort is wasted on preventing its exact replication. Conversely rather than trying to have a new genius idea I’d try copying a successful effort of two to five years ago, when that part of surveillance has died down. The mass media, and especially the visual ones, have skewed our world perception to such an amount, that not even trained experts seem able to keep a balanced perspective any more.