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News to me. Except for a small group of them, they generally do not even seem to be able to to meaningful experiments and their models seem to be extremely simplistic: https://journals.plos.org/plos...

Maybe if they made less grande declarations and did actual science instead, there would be something useful from that field. But that may still take a while.

I propose you see if there is actually a problem before acting or panicking. Wow, what a radical concept, to insist on replication of results.

Why not check to see if there are other comparable results before using rhetoric which depends on their non-existence?

https://journals.plos.org/plos...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
John P. A. Ioannidis

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Further reading:

"There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias".
- Dr John Ioannidis (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”) August 30, 2005 http://journals.plos.org/plosm...

"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine".
- Dr. Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books January 15, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/article...

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness".
- Richard Horton, Editor, “The Lancet” April 11th 2015 http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/...

"Scientists these days, especially but not only in such blatantly corrupt fields as pharmaceutical research, face a lose-lose choice between basing their own investigations on invalid studies, on the one hand, or having to distrust any experimental results they don’t replicate themselves, on the other. Meanwhile the consumers of the products of scientific research—yes, that would be all of us—have to contend with the fact that we have no way of knowing whether any given claim about the result of research is the product of valid science or not".
- John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blog...

This experiment has been performed with Lunar Soil Simulant (JSC-1) here on earth. Plants were able to grew, poorly, in it directly. Adding organic matter and fertilizer improved growth significantly as expected.

https://journals.plos.org/plos...

Completely wrong.

TFA reads like FUD. If I were trying to sell my services as a cybersecurity contractor, this is the kind of crap I'd write. Essentially, it boils down to "complexity is bad", and "wireless is scary".

I've worked defense contracts. They're always trying to "shore up vulnerabilities", and always making a big deal about every tiny detail that isn't perfectly in compliance with a rule written for an entirely-different scenario. Exceptions are the norm. That doesn't mean the system is actually vulnerable to any attack, or even that a possible attack would be successful.

Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone stop looking at security, especially in such important systems... I'm just saying that shouting about generic insecurity doesn't improve anything, and in fact makes things worse by encouraging a checklist-based approach to compliance.

I don't know how the F-35 handles network security, but I found this a fascinating read for network security for a military UAV prototype helicopter: https://journals.plos.org/plos...

Taste is a perception, an experience involving food and a brain. It's not simply built into the food. You can easily manipulate how things taste to a person just by changing the context. For example, if you tell people that the same piece of meat is or isn't humanely farmed, it tastes different.

Did you just construct a gigantic strawman argument that says that anyone who is in favor of less government must support China stealing IP? Seriously? Please - for the love of God, please stop that. Argue in good faith, not in ridiculous exaggerations.

I feel like you are arguing against what you imagine conservatives are saying. I'm so confused by your comment. Or, to put it a better way, you're arguing against what conservatives would have to say in order for your silly rhetoric to be taken seriously. Either way, it's strawmen all the way down. I remember hearing of studies (which I really need to chase down, if anyone has the reference I'd appreciate it) in which self-described "liberals" (or progressives) and conservatives were asked to describe how the other side would think of the issues. The conservatives proved to be pretty good at describing the leftists' positions, while the leftists were much worse at characterizing what their ideological opponents thought.

Reference: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0050092

You're begging the question quite a bit there.

Not all drugs significantly impact coordination and judgement. Not all drugs have a significant negative impact on mental health.

"Results: 21,967 respondents (13.4% weighted) reported lifetime psychedelic use. There were no significant associations
between lifetime use of any psychedelics, lifetime use of specific psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote), or past
year use of LSD and increased rate of any of the mental health outcomes. Rather, in several cases psychedelic use was
associated with lower rate of mental health problems"

https://journals.plos.org/plos...

Don't get too excited though, most medical problems cannot be boiled down to a single gene. Most genes have been found to do many things and interact with hundreds and thousands of others. Even the yeast genome, one of the simplest we know has been found to be far more complex than we thought in how genes result in particular traits. In the human genome it is likely that thousands of genes contribute to particular phenotypes. Some people seem to think organisms are like little machines a human might design, but they are not, they evolved, and the complexity is mind boggling, as evolution only cared about whether things worked, and did not require modularity to generate the design.

The paper that article is based on can be read for free here: http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

Note that it doesn't support the conclusion to draw.

Based on previous work they attribute lack of participation in STEM to be strongly related to anxiety over ability in maths. They note that despite girls often out-performing boys in maths at school, they experience a lot more anxiety. In more developed countries there is less economic motivation to overcome those worries.

The study concludes not that girls are inherently less interesting in STEM, but that they are actually getting less encouragement to overcome their anxiety about maths in more progressive countries. So the incorrect assumption that "girls suck at maths" is still there, it just needs a different technique to overcome it because merely having parents and teachers give equal encouragement is not enough.

... The research, published in PLOS Biology, was done in a lab, with samples containing scalp hair follicles from more than 40 male hair-transplant patients...

The stuff got research attention because the patient population includes, or is primarily compose of, guys. Like erectile dysfunction. For that we've got at least 14 drugs. Coincidentally, all the doctors listed on the paper appear to be men. If it had been for uterine cancer, endometriosis, IBS, fibromyalgia or any of a host of female-specific afflictions or where the majority of patients were women, the sponsor Giuliani Pharma (website down; Google cache) would have said "Nice work, but doesn't pay the bills. Find something to give me a giant hardon, and let me fuck all night. Then you get money. All those women-problems things are just in their poor little heads anyway."

A count of insects last year found that the number of insects living for instance in Germany has dropped to a quarter since the 1980ies. No. Not dropped by a quarter (25% less). Dropped to a quarter (25% remaining). And that's in protected areas, where the use of insecticides is limited.

A ban of three insecticides (there are many more) will not cause the insect population to immediately rebound to the numbers of the 1980ies. So there is no imminent famine due to insects eating our crops. There might be an imminent famine due to the lack of pollinators, which also are reduced to a quarter.

This applies to mostly medicine and social science see John Ioannidis's research paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" : http://journals.plos.org/plosm... It seems to me the sciences that deal with statistical p-value significance are all subject to false published research findings , for instance, see Craig Bennet's "Neural correlatates of interspecies perspectitve taking in post-mortem Salmon : An argument for multiple comparisons corrections". http://prefrontal.org/files/po... The paper is a deadpan gag and a veiled attack on sloppy methodology among neuroimaging researchers. Also, researchers run the Baltimore Stockbroker scam : https://somemathematicalmusing... When they selectively choose not to publish certain results in favor of other ones etc... So on and so forth etc...

There's a big difference between growth of cells (they get bigger) and proliferation of cells (they divide to create new cells), and so it's important to be careful. (I've been working on modeling both cell growth and cell division for a good while, mostly in cancer and a little in tissue engineering and synthetic biology. e.g., here.)

I looked at the study. They stained for Ki-67, the gold standard immunohistochemical marker for cell division. Cells that are actively cycling--in late G1, S, G2, and M phase, and a smidgen of G1 phase after division because Ki67 protein doesn't instantaneously degrade--stain positive for this marker. In particular, it is a nuclear marker, so the stain is localized to the cell nucleus, and the stain is very definitive. It's one of the easiest immunostains to do image processing on, because you can do nuclear segmentation, then analyze the colors in the segmented nuclei to see if they stained positive or negative for Ki-67.

And that Ki-67 marker was virtually non-existent in the region of interest in all the samples above 13 years old. See Figure 2. This is *the* universal gold standard marker for cell division used across pathology and experimental biology. So yes, the study indeed found no proliferating cells in the GCL. And then they used this "young neuronal cell" marker (DCX+PSA-NCAM+ cells) to further confirm what they already saw in Ki67.

Also, the Nature link is the *summary* of the paper, and not the actual paper. It's pretty common for the big journals to ask for a non-involved scientist in the same field to write a summary and commentary when a potentially controversial or significant paper comes out. Here's the actual paper.

> Sweden pioneered gender reassignment surgery

Not really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Swedish surgeons got much, much better at it. But the surgical treatment of gender dysphoria, especially when re-routing the urethra for penile or vaginal transgender surgery, has been a mixed blessing. While effective for some, it has *not* been a panacea, it is expensive to do and to support long term, and has opened the door for enormous political and social pain and confusion for millions of people misled about the long-term results and benefits. Its medical and psychological benefits are not as resoundingly positive as some political activists would have you believe. The mortality rate for them is quite high.

For graphs, see http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

You're an idiot

Says the guy whose first links says, "It wasn't a screed or a rant". Nice job, social "justice" idiot, you linked to a source that directly contradicts your original statement.

did not understand the papers he was citing

Actually, he does. From your link: "That said, Damore's assertion that men and women think different is actually pretty uncontroversial"

The article just tries to downplay it. And, oh look, James is right again!

"In general, he notes, women prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things--the implication being that Google is a more thing-oriented workplace, so it just makes sense that fewer women would want to work there. Again, the central assertion here is fairly uncontroversial."

Their basic counter-argument is to say that these are just averages, and that individuals vary within the population. Which is perfectly true, BUT YOU ARE LOOKING AT AVERAGES when you look at employee demographics.

Even further, something like a 10% biological difference can yield extreme differences on the tail end of distributions, and we know that Google hires the best, that is, from the tail end of distributions.

Funny how Google mandates discriminatory hiring practices without any science to back it up, and fires the guy who points out science that explains differences in representation.

Texas is not remotely fascist, in fact it's pretty loose as far as laws are concerned. Basically, leave people the hell alone and you'll have a good time there. Californians are voting with their feet and leaving the workers' paradise. You simply don't know enough to criticize accurately, you've got some imaginary idea in your head and you criticize that. This happens a lot among leftists. Self-described leftists (or progressives) and conservatives were asked to describe how the other side would think of the issues. The conservatives proved to be pretty good at describing the left-liberals' positions, while the liberals were much worse at characterizing what their ideological opponents thought. http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

I also love the "they're like Texans, but they have cowboy hats and boots." Need I say more about the ignorance department?

This has been known for a while, but perhaps not broadly known, and not by "the general public". The link to the ICLAC in TFS is evidence of that.

The actual paper will answer your questions, but briefly: people make mistakes in maintaining cell lines, and contamination is easier than you think, particularly in primary cell lines.

I didn't see the authors mention if reproducibility sorts this out, if someone can't reproduce the results in another cell line or in an animal model, the original results are considered context dependent.

0,8% - the paper is open access if you want the details. http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

What percentage of the population is affected by that seemingly small impact?

How many billions (or trillions) in costs are associated with that seemingly small impact?

Risk mitigation relies on asking the right questions. Unfortunately, TFA starts to answer my questions. Oncology is the field most contaminated by a large margin. I'd say it's pretty damn important to understand just how fucked our studies are related to one of mankinds most pervasive killers. Cancer affects a hell of a lot more than 0.8% of the population.

This is all about money, always has been, always will be.

"To perform these [Studies of the modern carbon cycle] tasks, the project expects to need significant resources. Specifically, studies of the modern carbon cycle will require about 15 teams devoted to laboratory and field investigations. Analyses of past events will require about another 15 teams for sample acquisition and geochemical analyses. New theory and related modeling to motivate and support the entire effort will require an additional 10 teams. An average of $2.5M/year for each team would result in a $1B, ten-year project. The outcome would be a fundamental understanding of carbon cycle dynamics, revolutionizing earth and environmental science and resulting in a comprehensive, objective evaluation of the long-term risks of modern environmental change. This is necessarily an extraordinary opportunity for enlightened philanthropy, since a project of this scope could not be funded from public resources." from http://www.sciencephilanthropy...

The kooky AGW nuts in the govt/IPCC with their "forcing/feedback" algorithms off by an order of magnitude are doing the same thing. They want giant sums of money, all the while they (NCDC) are manipulating the weather records in HCN, or making bogus studies based on badly situated weather stations situated next to a heat sink. Next thing you know, we'll see one of these weather stations placed next to a nuclear reactor to cook the books further

honoraria for reviewers (yes, we pay them),

As a scientist who has reviewed dozens of scientific manuscripts for various journals, I say BULLSHIT!!!!
And bullshit to the $2000 cost per manuscript you are citing! According to that, Gold Open Access journals that charge less than $2000 (some even less than $1000) should simply not exist. But they do, and many of them. In fact, the most famous (and probably one of the most prestigious) Gold Open Access journals, PLoS ONE, charges only $1490 per accepted publication.

So bollocks to you and whoever modded up your comment.

You would do. However, the actual data clearly shows that the stalagmite was formed after skeletalisation of the pelvis.

Nutrition studies are notoriously difficult to make accurate. Take, for example, this study (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0076632) that found that the reported nutrition intake for survey participants was "not physiologically plausible." And this was for one of the most well-regarded U.S. surveys of nutritional intake.

Now, I haven't reviewed the study listed in this article, but I am highly, highly skeptical because of how hard it is to get accurate food consumption information from the public.

Consider, for instance, what you've eaten so far today - what have you eaten, and exactly how many servings of each item have you consumed? If this is hard to do for a couple of meals in one day, imagine how hard it is to make that accurate over an extended period of time.

in this case it's being done for a very positive reason, which is that it's known to reduce the transmission of AIDS

Nope, the preponderance of evidence say the transmission of AIDS is either unaffected or enhanced by circumcision.

Almost any claims that circumcision protects from AIDS quote the infamous Camp Orange/Orange Farms study. That study consists of an egregious list of scientific misconduct. For example, the circumcised group had received sexual education while the control group did not -- so it's not surprising that men who had a downtime and were taught safe(r) practices will have less AIDS. The researchers' bias was so strong they immediately destroyed the control group "so they can benefit too" before even the data was tabulated.

Let's take a look at other studies:small increase of risk; no effect; large increase. Or for gay men: UK, US, Scotland.

On the other hand, there's a significant increase of MtF transmission.

But, if a study is funded by the Gates Foundation, it will be stopped early "because of futility" of protection, while in fact the preliminary data show a strong increase of risk.

Or, papers outright lie about the conclusion: "Declining Rates in Male Circumcision amidst Increasing Evidence of its Public Health Benefit -- in all categories other than one the "benefit" is negative, and the only category where circumcision slightly wins (heterosexuals with syphilis) had a sample of 6.

(though I'm circumcised, as are most American men, and I don't consider myself "mutilated"

I'm sorry for you. Alas, people who suffer from some malady tend to have a strong bias that "it's the right thing to do". For example, the strongest driver for female circumcision are older women who were circumcised themselves. Same for the deaf.

even if it does (theoretically) reduce a little sexual pleasure

"theoretically", "a little"?!? While you're unable to make this test yourself, you can ask an intact friend: wear regular underwear (ie, not commando, not boxers), retract the foreskin, try walking. For extra bonus, do it where there are people around so you can't adjust (this randomly happened to me a couple times). The chafing is so strong it's a pain. If penises get so calloused such chafing is not noticeable, there's hardly any feeling left.

That's looking at the wrong statistics. What you'd want to consider is police shootings per encounter with police in order to see if there are any differences. Here's a study that does an excellent Baysian analysis of the data, which does show that black people are being shot by police at a greater rate than other racial groups.

It should be noted that this doesn't control for a lot of other factors that typically factor in to likelihood to commit crime such as socioeconomic status or family status. Being poor and from a single-parent household are two of the largest contributors to disposition towards criminal acts and these conditions are disproportionately seen in inner-city black communities. Those factors explain why blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime. Being black has almost nothing (there is still some unexplained parts of the gap between blacks and other groups, but that may just mean there is some factor not being controlled for.) to do with committing crime.

The “Google Manifesto”: Bad Biology, Ignorance of Evolutionary Processes, and Privilege

An interesting question for discussion might be whether we agree or disagree with what the fired employee said

Good idea. To address your two questions:

do you think women are "neurotic" and show "a lower stress tolerance"

Neurotic is a lousy word because it's poorly defined, but he clarified it as "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance." Do women have higher anxiety and lower stress tolerance than men? Scientific American says they have higher anxiety: "experts believe this difference arises from a combination of hormonal fluctuations, brain chemistry and upbringing." I don't know, but that is what Google's search engine dragged up.

their careers suffer because women are "agreeable" rather than "assertive"

At least one study says that women are "warmer," but no less "assertive" than men. That matches my narrow realm of experience.

I think it's important that we stick to actual research, instead of postulating wildly.

The propensity to jump to conclusions is not new. See this "research" which concluded that T-Rex's are cannibals based on a SINGLE bite mark which they found on a T-Rex:
https://www.theguardian.com/sc...

This is the paper:
http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

LSD used a single time can induce a psychotic break in some people.

I don't recall reading about any instance of this where the person did not already have some sort of aberrant mental condition. This study found that psychedelic use was not an independent risk factor for psychosis. I think that the other studies I've read had broadly similar conclusions.

I'm telling you right now that you're an idiot and you need to ***shut the fuck up*** before some naive fool takes your idiotic opinion as some sort of quality info.

You must feel embarrassed to have typed that.

There's no real order: Hearts and kidney efforts are well underway. Liver might be a bigger priority than kidneys actually. Dialysis is terrible compared to where we need to be with kidney function, but IIRC it's much further than where we are with liver dysfunction. Plus livers seem to have a better ability to organize and repair itself. The kidney would need a lot higher architectural precision, so it's a more distant goal unfortunately.

And approximately 0% of cervical cancer is believed to be hereditary; rather, it is generally believed to generally be caused by the HPV virus.

Rubbish. It's a multifactorial process. While HPV is an important factor genetic predisposition is also a factor. Not all women infected with a given carcinogenic strain of HPV develop cancer. So what's the variable? Genetics.

http://www.nature.com/news/hum...

A human nose has around 400 types of scent receptors. When the smell of coffee wafts through a room, for example, specific receptors in the nose detect molecular components of the odour, eliciting a series of neural responses that draw oneâ(TM)s attention to the coffee pot. But many details of that sequence are still unknown.

âoeThe relationship between the number of odorants that we can discriminate and the number of receptors that we have is unclear,â says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Some scientists assume that having more types of scent receptors indicates a more-sensitive sniffer.

2004 study

http://journals.plos.org/plosb...

However, some recent behavioral studies suggest that primates, including humans, have relatively good senses of smell. Resolution of this paradox may come from a larger perspective on the biology of smell. Here we begin by reassessing several overlooked factors: the structure of the nasal cavity, retronasal smell, olfactory brain areas, and language. In these arenas, humans may have advantages which outweigh their lower numbers of receptors. It appears that in the olfactory system, olfactory receptor genes do not map directly onto behavior; rather, behavior is the outcome of multiple factors. If human smell perception is better than we thought, it may have played a more important role in human evolution than is usually acknowledged.

Comparing the data on smell detection thresholds shows that humans not only perform as well or better than other primates, they also perform as well or better than other mammals. When tested for thresholds to the odors of a series of straight-chain (aliphatic) aldehydes, dogs do better on the short chain compounds, but humans perform as well or slightly better than dogs on the longer chain compounds, and humans perform significantly better than rats (Laska et al. 2000). Similar results have been obtained with other types of odors.

A third type of study demonstrating human olfactory abilities shows that in tests of odor detection, humans outperform the most sensitive measuring instruments such as the gas chromatograph.

2006 study
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

A surprising new study suggests that people can track a scent across a grassy field--at least if they're willing to get down on their hands and knees and put their noses to the ground. The findings are unlikely to put hunting hounds and drug sniffing dogs out of work, but they may earn a little respect for the poorly regarded human sense of smell.

Humans are widely believed to be poor at tracking scents, especially when compared to other mammals such as dogs and rodents. But few had ever put that idea to the test. A research team led by Jess Porter and Noam Sobel at the University of California, Berkeley, dipped 10 meters of twine in chocolate essence and laid it in a field to form two straight lines connected at a 135Â angle. Then they blindfolded 32 undergraduate students and had them don earmuffs, thick gloves and kneepads to prevent them from using sensory cues other than smell. When set loose in the field, two-thirds of the subjects successfully followed the scent, zigzagging back and forth across the path like a dog tracking a pheasant, the researchers report online 17 December in Nature Neuroscience.

Nearly all the subjects reported that the task was challenging, Porter says, but four of them got a chance to improve with practice. Over the course of several days, they learned to follow the trail faster and deviate less. Even so, their performance remained well below what other researchers have reported in dogs.

And this ignores the not uncommon case of people who have more sensitive sense of smell than average.

Yeah, but if you go to Walmart you can buy your own greens and make a better salad.

Just make sure you don't touch the receipt.

Nicotine isn't carginogenic, Einstein

Says you. Science, on the other hand, says otherwise.

Nicotine is a known risk factor for cancer development and has been shown to alter gene expression in cells and tissue upon exposure.
[...]
This study reveals previously unknown consequences of nicotine stress on the transcriptome of normal breast epithelial cells and provides insight into the underlying biological influence of nicotine on normal cells, marking the foundation for future studies.

Read the study here:
http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

Racial bias in police behavior (in the USA) is extremely well established pretty much across the board (as is gendered gaps in pay, promotion, evaluation, etc).

http://amstat.tandfonline.com/...
http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

... and so many more

You are correct; it's worded terribly.

The paper ( http://journals.plos.org/ploso... ) specifically mentions that their method allows for GPGPU processing due to parallel block evaluation instead of 'sliding window' evaluation of the image:
"Unlike the sliding-window method, which scans an image in a sequential manner, parallel window-searching divides the input image into several blocks and simultaneously performs classification on one block using each GPU core."

This is a step forward in commodification of self-driving car technology.

0.1 0.67

0.05 0.50

0.01 0.16

0.001 0.02

1. Even when half a field's relationships are true, at most 91 percent of published results are true. When one-tenth of a field's relationships are true, at most 67 percent of published results are true. This is abysmal. And more, why even investigate a topic when true relationships are common. Hypothesis testing then becomes a petty activity. What the statistician can't set, and what is never mentioned -- the Background Probability -- is most important in most research! "PPV depends a lot on the pre-study odds (R). Thus, research findings are more likely true in confirmatory designs ... than in hypothesis-generating experiments." The problem becomes obvious when research seeks from 30,000 genes the (at most 30 genes) influencing a genetic disease, for which R = 30/30000 = 0.001 with a PPV about 0.02! When the Background Probability (so too R) is moderate, a design with moderate power (1 - beta) can get good PPV. But research often works in a field of previously unseen results, or uses data mining software (a good generator of false results), where R does equal 0.01 or even 0.001. In these many fields, the Background Probability (so too R) swamps any statistical design's alpha and beta. "Most research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields... A PPV EXCEEDING 50% IS QUITE DIFFICULT TO GET." Indeed, a look at the PPV formula shows that whatever alpha, even a power of 1 (a little thought reveals why more power hardly helps here) produces mostly false results if the pre-study odds R itself is less than alpha! "Claimed effect sizes are in fact the most accurate estimates of the net bias. It even follows that between 'null fields' [fields with no true relationships], the fields that claim stronger effects ... are simply those t

70% doesn't seem high enough to make any decisions.

To make legal decisions on care or something? Probably not. But it MIGHT be evidence that we're on the right track to communication.

And how was this controlled for confirmation bias, like has been discredited for other techniques where the person that reads the results also knows the answers, like e.g. dog training and lie detectors?

This is a valid question. I skimmed the actual study, but I don't have time right now to dig through the jargon and see how much these results are likely to be due to confirmation bias.

Here's the actual study. Does someone who knows more about these sorts of measurements want to sort out whether or not there were adequate procedural constraints to prevent confirmation bias?

Without doing double blinds, 70% seems like a horribly bad result, and no more than what would be expected from confirmation bias.

That's just nonsense. You can't tell whether confirmation bias is present by the level of success! That's not how stats work. In some cases, confirmation bias could easily produce a 95% or even 100% success rate. In other cases, it would be barely better than chance. You can only tell confirmation bias by looking at procedure and data analysis techniques.

And in any case, I'm surprised at the statistical ignorance shown by many posts in this thread. 70% success where 50% is chance may or may not be a significant finding -- if you do it with 10 questions (or coin flips or whatever), it's probably not significant. But if you ask a million questions or flip a coin a MILLION times and see 70% heads or whatever, it's pretty strong evidence of a pattern. (Would you place a 1:1 wager and gamble against heads on a coin after a million flips like that?)

But again, whether the result shows strong statistical significance from data analysis is a different question from whether confirmation bias could be present in the procedure.

If people stopped smoking, there would be a savings in health care costs, but only in the short term. Eventually, smoking cessation would lead to increased health care costs.

THIS. There are literally dozens of economic analyses that have concluded the same thing. In fact, over 20 years ago, it was debated whether to bring this argument up in the Big Tobacco litigation (see, for example, this NY Times article from 1996). More recent analyses (such as here and here) agree. Philip Morris even commissioned its own study a while back to argue in the Czech Republic that it was actually saving society money because of decreased lifespans. But the study ended up just making cigarette companies look even more hated, so they backed off of it.

Bottom line is: "healthy" elderly people still cost society a LOT of money to keep alive -- in pensions and Social Security, in assisted living, and yes -- even in generic health care. If you include all of those things, there's NO QUESTION that smokers cost society less by dying earlier.

But even if you take health care costs on their own, it's pretty likely smokers cost less. "Healthy" older people end up living longer and needing hip replacements or treatment for minor cancers or hospitalization over a cold that turns into pneumonia (which doesn't happen as often with younger folks) or whatever -- that stuff adds up greatly over the years. Add an extra 5 or 10 years of "elder care" for non-smokers, and on average those "healthy" people will cost more than the additional costs from a smoker who dies early from a heart attack or whatever.

None of this is an argument in favor of smoking. And perhaps there's still some ethical argument to tax smoking more in order to promote "healthy" living or whatever, which perhaps some governments will make. But let's not be disingenuous about blaming smokers for overall societal cost, when they're mostly "taking one for the team" and giving up their Social Security or whatever for you.

10,000x more birds are killed by cats than by solar (?!?) and wind? Can you provide a citation for that? I'd like to use it in shutting-up idiots in the future (if true).

Oh, it's quite true. See this recent study for the numbers on wind turbines, and this one for cats*. This report ranks various energy sources; perhaps unsurprisingly coal actually kills the most birds.

It turns out cats kill a lot of animals, making them "the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals." According to that second study, though, most of the deaths are attributable to un-owned cats. The actual numbers from the studies are exactly those quoted by Anaerin above.

* Nature isn't open access but...

this is the opposite of what every study ever conducted has found

No. http://journals.plos.org/ploso... found that suicide rates increase dramatically a few years after surgery, and reaches a level substantially higher than the general population. Or to use their own words:

Conclusions
Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.

There's evidence that this is nonetheless significantly lower than suicide rates amongst pre-op transexuals but sure as shit doesn't suggest that surgery left everybody in a happy place.

"Ecosystems span roads no problem." Naive.

http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.safepassagecoalitio...

Ayahuasca improves health.

Maybe it's not a natural assumption. Maybe it's a considered position, reached after looking at evidence.

A quick search nets me http://journals.plos.org/ploso... a 2013 submission. Quote: "The most effective species, Asparagopsis, offers the most promising alternative for mitigation of enteric CH4 emissions."

Actually, it seems they work (at least for IBS) even if you are explicitly told it is a placebo: Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome Although possibly not as well...it does not seem that study had a group that received a placebo without being told (just the group that was told & the group that received no treatment at all).

Yeah, not impressed by this study

Link to study here:
http://journals.plos.org/ploso...

Reading through their methods - they had a single variable they were testing - whether the screen was in use or not. They were not testing why the phone screen was in use. They did have controls across various demographics and some preexisting health conditions - such as sleep apnea.

I really wish the study had gone into why the phone was in use. Simple example - I personally enable night shift and use the Kindle app in low light mode. That helps puts me to sleep each night - not keep me awake. As parent noted, other studies outside of smartphones have gone into this level of detail and shown some interesting results.

OB xkcd, and OB PhD Comics.

Not long ago, we were all being told that illumination that mimics natural sunlight cures Seasonal Affective Disorder. Now we're being told it causes insomnia and bipolar disorder. If you look at the original article, the effect is tiny at best.

40 years ago, I was taught in school that Homo sapiens was the only intelligent species on the planet, because of tool use, self awareness and language.

It isn't all that clear-cut. I liked my bio-professor's definition of "is it cruel?" - "if it doesn't try to get away from you while you do it, it's not cruel" said about passing an electrical current through sea urchins causing them to release their eggs and sperm into the water...

Is the fly intelligent? More than many people seem to give it credit for. I have observed territorial, investigative and defensive behavior in wasps - and they are supposed to have something like 100,000 neurons total, with under 10,000 in their brain. Until such time as we can "make" a fly or wasp analog with similar capabilities from scratch (not copying, designing from the ground up), I'd say that we should reserve judgement on just how intelligent the creatures are, or are not.

Does that mean that we should never harm a fly? Some people think so, not me, but they probably deserve a bit more respect than a speck of mud on your shoe.

http://journals.plos.org/ploso...