Random Ramblings of a Raconteur

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The long awaited comments on Bayon et al. (list of 2012-04-16) have finally been published. Neumann et al. don’t convince me though. She and Bayon agree on climate being the primary driver enabling the forest to be settled and she herself assumes the ease secondary forest can be cleared with to have been taken advantage of. All Bayon claims is the observed pulse of erosion being far in excess of what can be explained by climate alone and showing a clear anthropogenic signature. Maley et al.’s objections seem far more founded but are convincingly countered in Bayon’s reply. Read the rest of this entry »

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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I wonder for how many other subjects beside biology Llamas’s result could be duplicated. Mathematics is the basis for quantitative thinking.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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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. Read the rest of this entry »