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Beer-Drinking Scientist Debunks Productivity Correlation
austinpoet writes in with a blog post debunking the theory we discussed a few days back that scientists' beer consumption is linearly correlated with the quality of their work. Chris Mack, Gentleman Scientist and beer drinker, has analyzed the paper and found it is severely flawed. From his analysis: "The discovered linear relationship between beer consumption and scientific output had a correlation coefficient (R-squared) of only about 0.5 — not very high by my standards, though I suspect many biologists would be happy to get one that high in their work... Thus, the entire study came down to only one conclusion: the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic drank a lot of beer."
Who's to say the "debunker" isn't just having fun himself?
More research is needed.
Would this ever lead to drug testing researchers that announce amazing new scientific breakthroughs? (sort of far fetched but an interesting idea nonetheless).
... apparently you've not been taking your drugs. They're a job requirement you know. I understand that the enhancer pills give you migraines, but we promised BigMegaCorp that breakthrough they've been wanting, and you do like your job, don't you?"
Sure it would. I can see it now:
"I just got the results of your drug test
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Hm, I'd bet you're bored; that's probably why you're on Slashdot.
It beats the daily Microsoft Windows Vista article(s). Those don't get interesting no matter how many beers you drink before reading them.
Indeed - but with such a small sample size the researchers would not have been able to adjust for exposure, or age in this case. My guess is that beer consumption declines with age and science is generally cumulative (the longer you do science the more papers you produce and therefore the higher the probability of writing something of interest). In other words, age could easily explain this beer/science relationship - younger scientists drink more - as could a whole host of other variables.