First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Seeing the comments and reply to Halpern I find her original conclusions confirmed, which goes against my preconception, but thus are the facts.
On May 25th I wrote: “[Slimak’s] arguments against moderns are quite convincing too. So, could these be the elusive Denisovans?” Seeing the comment and reply by Zwyns and Slimak I now tend toward the more parsimonious UP assignation while standing by my dismissal of a Neanderthal association.
A more fitting title for McCaffery would be “how to lie efficiently and how to hide facts by confusion”. This is decidedly not the kind of government the fathers of democracy had in mind. As to Kahneman, it’s all been said before, see Mt. 7, 26.
In the current issue 7381 (Jan 19th) of nature there are a new case of scientific fraud (Dipak Das, director Cardiovascular Research Centre, University of Connecticut), three articles on how best to hawk science projects to private investors, and one on how to censor reporting results, that might lead to misuse.
Science used not be a salaried career but the pursuit of gentlemen of independent means funded by their own money, who freely exchanged results among their peers. This is the environment, in which scientific ethos originated, and it may well be it, or something similar, is the only one, where it can endure. The traditional Ordinarienuniversität retained many of those characteristics while today’s rat-race of competitive career science certainly doesn’t.