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."

Comments

Re:!news

[psychodelicacy]

Seems I'm a Troll, and Insightful, and Overrated. I always knew I had identity issues, but this is one to tell my therapist ;)

Question: there seems to be a lot of complaining recently about specific people posting stories that aren't seen as well-researched or newsworthy. Why does this happen? I assumed that editors just evaluated stories as they came in against objective criteria - is that naive? Sorry if this is offtopic.