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The fault lies with the university's PR department this time.

Obligatory PHD Comics strip: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

Yeah, so, this is a scientific study, which means you should be pulling from medical dictionaries when possible, not general purpose dictionaries, since these words probably have specific meanings. In fact, in doing a quick Google for your definition of the word, it looks like you really had to stretch to find one that seemed to support your argument, since the OED, M-W, and plenty of others all define it pretty much as "nourishing" or "full of nutrients", and M-W's medical dictionary defines it as "providing nourishment". Honestly, you need only glance at the word "nutritious" to understand its roots and that it is clearly related to the idea of nourishment and nutrients (my thesaurus (Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus) even lists "full of nutrients" as a synonym).

In the context of the study, "containing nutrients" is exactly what nutritious means, though, to be clearer, they probably should have specifically defined how it would be used somewhere in the paper. They may have done so. I haven't read it, but it's good practice in research papers to define the terms you're using if you're going to be making specific claims, that way you avoid these types of problems later.

For additional reading, see: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

I'm not so sure about that. PhD Comics broke down the FY 2009 budget. It's worth taking a look. $68B out of $3,518B, or about 19%.

That should be 1.9%

Research is -- on the scale that government or really large corporations operate -- cheap. It is a relatively small portion of the budget and yet returns value over decades and centuries.

I'm not so sure about that. PhD Comics broke down the FY 2009 budget. It's worth taking a look. $68B out of $3,518B, or about 19%. Now, having said this, there are impacts from government research funds that reach far beyond a large corporation research budget. Research can produce massive savings that last decades, grow whole new industries, or create entirely new "really large corporations" (Google came from an NSF grant). A typical corporate lab is not focused on problems that lead to societal-level savings or whole new fields. They lack the large-scale funds and are often constrained to the company's best interest. Government funded research generally covers a sector of the research map that companies avoid due to risk, long-term payback, or scale.

It is sad that it takes a comic strip to illustrate just how out of kilter things have become:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1086

Bingo. As soon as I thought that, I immediately thought of this obligatory xkc^H^H^H PHD comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Science news cycle

The Science News Cycle:

* Your Research : Conclusion: A is correlated with B (=0.56), given C, assuming D and under E conditions.
* University PR Office: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Scientists Find Potential Link Between A and B (Under certain conditions)
* News Wire Organizations: A causes B, say Scientists.
* The Internets: Scientists out to kill us again
* Cable News: A causes B all the time (we saw it on a blog). What will this mean for Obama?
* Local Eyewitless News: A: KILLER AMONG US? More at 11.
* Your Grandma wearing a tinfoil hat with antennae: "I'm wearing this to ward off A"

On this theme, I prefer the obligatory PHDcomics: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
:)

And, I suppose that somebody should post a link to the obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/882/

And the obligatory PHDcomics: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

In addition of the media needing "the latest hottest news" and thus over blowing the latest new subject (which merely has 1 study using a sample of 10) instead of making a deep review of a well studied subject, there are also problems comming from within the scientific community too :

Lots of research groups are under "publish or die" pressure: they a under pressure to publish as many papers as possible, and thus will tend to publish whenever they got a small "bump" in the signal - "which may under some circumstance be interpreted as something unexpected" - specially when it was never seen before (= unknown, more chance to attract attention, than being study number #23 that confirms that the well studied substance "XyZ-wateverocetone" and disease "Somethingitis" have no interraction, no matter what a paper published 13 years ago). There's a preference for original research in the scientific media, conferences, and so on.

Also, most research groups need funding, and thus whenever something has a slightly above average correlation factor, the paper will automatically jump to the conclusion "could one day be used to cure cancer" trying to whore some investments (this is the life sciences equivalent of putting "might also have some possible military applications" at the end of an engineering paper).

Also, pharmaceutical industries have the need to patent the crap out of anything remotely interesting, and think about actual uses later on, just to be sure to be able to secure potential revenue if the substance turns out to be successful. (This also leads to a patent minefield, where some substance aren't investigated much, because they are patent covered by company AbCorp, which doesn't study at all the diseases which might benefit from it).

All this has a rather negative result both on the scientific community :
- too much hype which ends up making a bad signal-to-noise ratio in the litterature, and difficult to mine the litterature for leads, inspiration or good data upon which to build.

and on the general population:
- because a lot of hype in the media turns out to be fluke or overrated or simply not further researched, they tend to think that most science is based on wrongs.
In practice, one might be right to be sceptic about a single paper making wild predictions out of 10 samples, but on the other hand, when there has been absolutely massive amount of research all bringing the same conclusions, there's no need in being sceptical (like evolution...)

What passes for science is not always science. You can't blame people for distrusting the conflicting and wrong headlines. Yes, the media deserves a lot of blame, but it's not all their fault. Watch this video from Tom Naughton and you'll learn how bad some areas of "science" can be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1RXvBveht0

Sounds like this story has gone through The Science News Cycle, and forced someone to resign.

After all, who needs progress when you can have sensationalist media instead?

Obligatory PhDComics.

Piled Higher & Deeper had a whole bunch of comics on this topic a while back: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1467 and my favourite: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1469

Piled Higher & Deeper had a whole bunch of comics on this topic a while back: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1467 and my favourite: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1469

Typical science news cycle in progress...

Einstein was unable to find a teaching post, and was working in a patent office when he published his annus mirabilis papers. Things have changed over the years though. John Dewey discovered a century ago how children best learned - let the child direct his own learning, and have an adult to facilitate this. This, of course, is not how children are taught. Things nowadays are very test-heavy, and becoming even more so, not as a means to help students in seeing what their deficiencies are, but as a punishment system - and the teachers, and the administrators are under the same punishment system. The carrot of reward is very vague and ill-defined and far-off. It is a system designed to try to squelch the curiosity of those handful of students who had been curious and wanted to learn. Businesses want to get into the education gravy train, and all this charter school stuff is being embraced by both parties, which isn't surprising if you look at the funding behind it.

At the university, the financial incentives are all aligned so that publishing is a necessity. If one does not publish, they do not get tenure, and then all those years of work were for naught as the academic career is over. And what gets published? An average series of experiments done by the scientific method would usually lead to either inconclusive data and results, or just wind up in a dead end. And what journal wants to publish those results after months of work? One of the most popular Phd comics is this one. It seems fairly obvious to me - the more financial incentives are tied to getting published, the more that bogus studies are going to be published. As far as the idea of honesty, integrity or whatever, these things will gradually subside for most people when they come into conflict with keeping a roof over one's head and food on the table.

Warming is bad because it will make the earths inhabitable area diminish. This significantly changes the available land mass that humans, and other animals, can effectively colonize and live fruitful childbearing lives. ... Lastly, increasing temperatures melt polar ice and raise sea levels. Further limiting usable land mass. You try to act like its all about temperature, but clearly you don't really understand the full breadth of the idea. How about this fun fact.

I see this argument surface from time to time (usually along with boiling oceans in 400+ years), and it appears to do so without any regard for the science. Of the reports I have read from most real climatologists, including those who support AGW, they indicate that the warming trend is exceedingly subtle--think half a degree per century or less. This isn't much; those scientists involve with the studies are themselves disappointed when the press reports things like "Scientists discover alarming increase in climate change," and it is that reporting which very closely follows in line with this cartoon.

Further, even if significant warming of several degrees per century were to occur, your argument neglects the possibility that areas currently locked in permafrost would then open up for an increasingly temperate clime (Siberia, northern Canada, etc). Never mind that it's also well known to paleontologists that during Earth's warmest periods, biodiversity was at its peak. This isn't to say that warming is good, but it's certainly not as horrific as Al Gore would like you to believe. And remember: Gore just recently purchased oceanfront property. If he were that concerned about rising ocean levels, you would think he might've invested in property farther inland...

Also, warmer temperatures will create more hostile weather patters further limiting usable land area as certain weather patterns hit certain regions harder. (ie. hurricanes on the east coast).

I highly doubt this claim, because the models climate scientists have run--even with the most significant warming trends--barely show an increase of around 5% in hurricane rainfall and incidence by 2080, which is well within error margins. Remember that each year following Katrina was supposed to become worse? Hasn't happened yet. I also suspect it won't, and if the models are correct, this is a misnomer likewise reported by the press and not by climatologists.

Hotter summers make for colder winters. How long before we trigger another ice age. Perhaps you should look up positive feedback loops.

That's not completely true. The last article I read tying global warming to a cooling trend is the cooling of the upper atmosphere that mucks about with CFCs and degenerates ozone. I have seen more studies that link melting polar ice caps with a shut down of the Gulf Stream (cold, fresh water sinking underneath the ocean currents, disrupting or shutting them down completely), and the lack of warm water flowing across the eastern US seaboard and western Europe would interfere with winters, making them colder. It's nothing about a positive feedback loop of colder weather; if you shut down ocean currents feeding warm water around the global, you're very likely going to trigger an ice age. The only "evidence" I have seen about this extremes nonsense of hotter summers = colder winters is espoused almost exclusively in Slashdot comments as gospel and reporters with hearing problems.

This applies to much more than just code. I thinks it's mostly because of lack of distractions, but there's also the "I'll just finish this and go to bed" mentality.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1219

One of my favourite summaries about the fields of particle physics and cosmology coming together from PhD Comics.

It's called sensationalism, it makes people read articles. News media and journalists have refined their art such that almost anything can be trimmed and dropped into a prefabricated narrative that people are attracted to (the unconscious preference for consistency). e.g. Quantum woo makes things mystical, chemical X causes/cures cancer, chocolate derivate Q is good for you therefore chocolate is good for you.

It occurs due to successive layers of bullshit as the experiment goes through the research PR office, preliminary research by non-expert science editors with no interest in statistics, then a construction of human interest narrative around the whole thing, or failing that, speculative imagery as the chief editor proclaims it otherwise boring. To an editor, a boring story is thought horrendous compared to an inaccurate one. To a reader, speculation and manipulation is easily forgiven, while boredom results in declining circulation.

See also the science news cycle.

You could cut all funding for scientific research or 10% from Defense. In the former cause you would decimate the American university system, and the economy as a whole. In the latter case you might have to do without the Joint Strike Fighter (the total cost of which is ten times the entire research budget) or about four nuclear subs. In neither case would you even put a dent in overall spending. A bit more perspective: federal spending on research is equal to approximately %30 of the amount paid for interest on the National Debt.

Fighting over rounding errors in the budget like funding for research, the top income tax rate, education, etc. is simply another way to divert attention from Defense and Health and Human Services, which are by themselves larger than the economies of many countries.

It's not that you're wrong, you're just using different metrics. In physics (and astronomy, I think), the authors are usually listed in decreasing order of work done, starting with the person who did the most. The people at the end of the list have done so little work, why are they even on the paper? Because, as you say, they are listed in increasing order of importance (read: amount of grant money received). If you have enough people, sometimes they just throw them all into alphabetical order and pretend that everybody reading the CVs of the people who actually did the work will somehow know that they did.

This guide may also be helpful: PHD's Guide to the Author List

There will never be a "Vaccine" for cancer, here's a nice explanation why:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1162

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1056
will avoid looking for more /. + PhD comics + work is a wicked combination. :P

1 - Started grad School (MSc)
2 - Dropped out (or better, was 'invited' to drop out by my supervisor)
3 - Never looked back

This: http://xkcd.com/664/ doesn't exist

In reality Academia will go: "this isn't in my research area so I don't care", "you didn't prove the linearity of the solution", "not enough citations in your paper"

Corporate will go somewhere like the comic, but they may also be happy with you cause you solved a problem that was delaying the schedule,
no one could solve or it had a bad impact on the product (happened to me, and it got me 'karma points'

Academia: Too much work, not enough pay. And as the article mentions, it's problems and solutions that don't apply somewhere else (even though mine was in Wireless communication)

Most of the people that kept going are earning less than me and/or at a previous stage at their careers.

Granted, my supervisor was 'inexperienced' to say the least.

Really, I'm glad I got a job instead of pursuing an academic career. Where I can work with what interests me,
people can use your work, there's less sucking up, less BS and at least I get payed.

Also this: http://www.phdcomics.com/

This explains it quite well. It has pictures, so with luck people like you and Asscranial Monkeyhole(180766) might understand it.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1432

Through simulations we show that botnets on the order of 250, 000 nodes can increase process- ing delays from orders of microseconds to orders of hours.

But also what sensationalist newspaper will NEVER publish short of death threaths :

We also propose and validate a defense against CXPST. Through simulation we demonstrate that current defenses are insufficient to stop CXPST. We propose an alternative, low cost, defense that is successful against CXPST, even if only the top 10% of Autonomous Systems by degree deploy it. Additionally, we consider more long term defenses that stop not only CXPST, but similar attacks as well.

Read this:
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~schuch/papers/lci-ndss.pdf

Then read this:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

It's a simulation of the impact of a coordinated attack on BGP. We know since a long time back that BGP is vulnerable to a number of attacks, this being one of them. The researcher has done a good job with the simulations and putting numbers on it.

Nothing else to see here, move along. The writer of the news article has no idea what he/she is talking about. We have much larger stability issues (such as Network Neutrality, IPv6 swap over and government blocking) to deal with, and theoretical attacks by large scale bot nets on BGP Is not something that will keep me up at night.

This PHD Comics issue is particularly appropriate here:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=878

The article doesn't say exactly what the summary says. This is a clear case of Science news cycle.

Both seem pretty similar to me.

But there's a world of difference!

The media does not understand basic research. In this case, we see its obsession of finding genes for behaviors; it almost never works that way.

Genes aren't smartphone apps; you can't just say "there's a gene for that."

Genes are more akin to code than to building blocks. A gene is more like a function than it is like a brick or mortar, and we have very little understanding of how genes interact with each other.

I'd like to give a "bravo!" to the authors for making the paper an open-access journal article. I know that's a hard sell to publishers. The full paper is available to all without registration.

The paper itself explains the high chance that this is overblown:

It is also important to sound several notes of caution. First, a consistent challenge in genetic association studies are that of third variable confounds, or unmeasured variables that are causally responsible for the observed finding but are associated with the measured variables thus generating a spurious association. ...

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1239

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1305

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1388

Must be a Ph.D. in arts, or they'd know to label their axes. Is that meant to be time on the horizontal axis?

They meant to label those axes. However they never got around to actually do it.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1388

Must be a Ph.D. in arts, or they'd know to label their axes. Is that meant to be time on the horizontal axis?

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1388

This. The researchers did not, in fact, call it the liberal gene. They called it the "dopamine receptor D4 gene". The paper is titled "Friendships Moderate an Association between a Dopamine Gene Variant and Political Ideology".

But that's excuse enough for the media to turn it into a "liberal gene". It's been transformed by the Science News Cycle.

Oh, and if we're being picky, it's an allele, a particular form of a gene. You could equally call the other alleles of a gene (which predispose you to have fewer friends as a teenager) "Conservative alleles". But that's stupid too.

Sure, but from the paper's wording, one can definitely not infer that "a specific gene that predisposes people" has been "identified". A gene has been identified, indeed, but it may have a correlation with one's political views. Absolutely no need to beautify this, but that's what's done all the time nonetheless. It causes people to misunderstand the actual findings, like this.

Related, here is PHD's take on "The Science News Cycle":

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

If the lack of scientific rigor of certain science journalists isn't bad enough, the consistence and accuracy the material gets constantly degraded as the story gets picked up by the next blog/news outlet. I call it the deathspiral of knowledge.

No, wait, it was actually http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

It's a well studied cycle.

Are you sure you want to do a Phd?

Hahaha.. this so reminds me of this.

Folks, what they've done is make Xenon Octa-fluoride, which is an order of magnitude harder than the previously created Xenon Tera-fluoride.

As cool as it is that some chemists have managed to make a new compound that had only been theorized before, it's not enough for the drooling media. So they try to explain why it is remotely relevant and interesting, and the media replies with this sort of gross stupidity.

Science reporting at its finest.

We hear about "teleportation" and something-or-other traveling faster than light, only to hear later that it's BS and we won't be seeing Star Trek technology anytime soon.

I believe this and this may be relevant.

That seems somewhat reasonable. Or what, scientists are just supposed to be revered as priests of hidden knowledge?

No, you're supposed to Read The Fucking Paper.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

....Or are the UCLA academics cutting theirs?

People should understand that the Academic publishers would never have dared try a 400% rise without a strong bargaining position. The sad reality is that publishing in a journal like Nature is a huge feather in the cap/CV of any academic, earning them big kudos, faster tenure track and generally more money overall. Publishers are well aware of this and are effectively trying to call UCLAs bluff here. They're very powerful groups with many "prestigious" journals, and the monopolization of the industry probably means that NPG controls a sizable percentage of overall journals; journals all the other academics NOT at UCLA now have less to compete against when publishing in.

This however is all a bit weird coming from a company whose online publishing director print journals will disappear in the next 10 years. Having said that, considering the power of DRM, perhaps that's exactly what publishers want.