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The minds behind the Retraction Watch website 
confirm what I have been saying for ages and that the common press coverage is completely beside the point:
Question: Is it different when a team member discovers plagiarism by such a high-profile person?
Weber-Wulff: The only difference is that the press reports only on high-profile persons when they are politicians. The plagiarisms that trouble me more are those by people who are currently working in academia, Read the rest of this entry »
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Politically correct fascism has just hit a new low. As nature’s Seven Days column reports, generous funder and supporter David Koch, a man who has done more for the museum than many others combined, has just been mobbed off American Museum of Natural History’s board of trustees. The reason given is that he also funds research that might yield results that might clash with the totalitarian opinion leaders’ prejudices. This is what science has now become.
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What is it about geneticists like Henn et al. that makes them completely unable to use common language and at least define their terms? PNAS is not a specialist journal and both micronewton and microtesla are well defined SI units that have nothing whatsoever to do with time or population size.
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Martens and Sonnenburg et al. offer another take on the microbiome. This time not its importance but its vulnerability and risk of permanent loss is pointed out. In their study on rodents they do not even mention the wide-spread antibiotic poisoning and abuse seen in humans.
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For those who are interested science has a supplement on aging . Unfortunately they started the year with a totally broken dysfunctional remake of their formerly useful website.
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Marginal lands have always been settled by the poor and disadvantaged driven off the more favourable ones and the all too frequent climatic downturns have always hit the marginal lands hardest. We can see that back to the earliest Neolithic settlements and the same pattern very probably already held true for Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. We can also see that this very use of the most vulnerable areas has always resulted in a disproportionate and lasting amount of ecological damage. So if the rich and advantaged are to spend enormous amounts of money as urged by Dennig et al. it will be used far better to get those settlers out of there than in a vain attempt at stabilizing their local weather patterns.
Time magazine has just declared Angela Merkel person of the year and made that the occasion for a long report from Germany. Several points are wrong and they do not look like random mistakes but seem to conform to an agenda.
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At first glance I liked Scudellari a lot. Looking closer it’s a good idea badly executed. Myth 3 contains two glaring mistakes. First for a value that can only be roughly estimated and for which the current best guess is 86 milliards (billions in American) 100 milliards is a reasonable round number. Calling it wrong instead of rounded is just nit picking. Secondly the brain masses of all placental mammals closely follow a power low from their body masses with an exponent of around 3/4. Not all are exactly on it, the primates follow a line slightly shifted to higher values but with the same slope. Of all mammals included humans and dolphins are clear outliers beyond the normal range (Martin 1981, nature 293, 57–60). Myth 5 is just wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
