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Can Bad Scientific Practice Be Fixed?
HughPickens.com writes: Richard Horton writes that a recent symposium on the reproducibility and
reliability of biomedical research discussed one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with science (PDF), one of our greatest human creations. 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. According to Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, a United Kingdom-based medical journal, the apparent endemicity of bad research behavior is alarming. In their
quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world or retrofit hypotheses to fit their data.
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative. Tony Weidberg says that the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication following several high-profile errors. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticize. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. "The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously," says Horton. "The bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system."
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative. Tony Weidberg says that the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication following several high-profile errors. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticize. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. "The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously," says Horton. "The bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system."
No.
Yes, by education. It costs money.
fix that first. science can lead the way.
The case against journalism is straightforward: much of the news articles, 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, journalists has taken a turn towards darkness. The apparent endemicity of bad journalist behavior is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, journalists too often sculpt facts to fit their preferred narrative of the world or retrofit hypotheses to fit their data.
Unlike journalists, however, science will always have to bow to reality. So, yeah, bad science practice will eventually run aground when reality hits, no matter how many epicycles one add to the model. But bad journalism will persists as long as it attracts eyeballs.
Oliver.
Bad scientific practices can't be fixed, but they can be ignored and discarded. However, we live in a world where one data point is enough to foresee rising trends in just about anything, so I guess it's going to be business as usual.
The MMR vaccine fiasco is of course the classic example of this; there are still people acting on the assumption that the lies were true, and that's getting people killed.
...when we replaced the scientific method with scientific consensus?
That 99 out of 100 scientists agree one thing is true doesn't make it true - it may be, it may not be, but the number of people that believe doesn't make it so.
When the scientific community is caught 'correcting' raw data and ostracizing 'non-believers' that challenge their beliefs they undermine the public trust in 'science'.
I was taught that the scientific method welcomed challenges to accepted beliefs - a return to that position would go a long way towards reforming belief in science.
Ken
There will always be shitty studies out there. With the proliferation of these pseudo-journals there will be even more bad science out there. This science is a waste of time of money but I don't think it poses much of a direct threat to progress. The bulk of the wrong studies are likely also the obviously bad and unintersting studies. These are the studies that nobody reads. The quantity of genuinely significant work (stuff that pushes forward a field) is tiny. When something that looks like this comes out it is immediately mobbed: people rush to reproduce the results and/or use the new techniques. If it's wrong we'll know very soon. In practice there is always an attempt to replicate the important stuff, even though the publish or perish nature of science means that pure replication studies are rarely carried out and instead are dressed up as a minor extension of preceeding work. The lesson is that it's dangerous to treat a single study as definitive. Wait for the field to catch up and, where appropriate, wait for the meta-studies.
soylentnews.org
Much of the problem comes from studies being published whose data is not robust because the sample size is too small to be meaningfully significant. This needs to be headlined in the abstract if it is published at all; the best magazines should refuse anything without a decent sample size, whilst the ones further down the food chain should have statisticans on hand to ask hard questions.
Discovering an apparent effect should result in more research - not a rush to believe...
No new news here. Similar to those who claim that publishing in a referreed journal is anything other than a start on the process. We don't reward validation (or invalidation) of model and measurement-based science anywhere near the level we do those who make the original (claimed) discovery. Until we do it's just science of old. We could start with a requirement for any government funded research to be published and archived in some cloud repository (verified as part of the next grant award), not just the resulting paper but all the data and code. If there's an IP reason to hold private until some money can be made, put an embargo on it for seven years or so and after that depend on copyright protections.
Another sad example is the bad science behind fifty years of low-fat food guidance that was overturned only recently some decades after the "big men" of that era died and could no longer shout down their deniers.
We now know that obesity and diabetes largely track high carb and purposefully low-meat-fat diets. The U.S. food police got it badly wrong starting back in the 1950s. The has caused no end of misery and even early death in the mistaken religious-like faith that meat fat is the same as body fat leading to fat plaque in arteries. All because "science" and the government (even the FLOTUS) said "live this way to live longer" even though it was never proven to prevent any heart disease (faster emergency care, defib units everywhere, statins perhaps, etc. have increased lifetimes far more than diet - and even exercise). See Nina Teicholz superbly footnoted text "The Big Fat Surprise" (following in the footsteps of Gary Taubes good work). Note this Stanford prof from a decade ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo&feature=youtu.be&t=3237
We inflate the importance of "science" - when instead cold reality is that every claim that hasn't been re-validated multiple times over a decade or three should just be ignored (especially in terms of informing any policy or law). It certainly should not override the first democratic right - that of voting with your wallet until well after a long cooling off period - 50 years is about right. Not that results shouldn't be published and evangelized to the public, but it must remain an individual choice, not a government dicta given how often the science is just wrong:
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Worse is those who in ignorance or malice let this common failure and nonsense survive in their "science" without any humility that this might well be the case, no matter how well intentioned:
http://xkcd.com/882/
Too many "scientists" are more concerned with the next big grant than with doing quality research. And getting grants is often a lot more about politicking and ass-kissing than making a case for why you actually deserve it.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Well I half believe that article ... judged by its own criteria
Science has always been full of bad science. The people involved have always had agendas. The problem is that we are creating so much data, that it is hard to process and identify what was created in a rigorous process and what is just a pile of crap. And, it is not easy to tell them apart. Then you have people involved. Newton tried his best to discredit Hooke. Hooke was lacking in some areas, but a genius in others. Some scientists just create large quantities of data, and don't know what to do with it. Others have a specific idea, and ignore anything which proves them wrong. Science has just gotten so big, it is hard to find the good amongst the, not really bad but, useless. Scientists must publish or be ignored, so they create anything they can to keep going.
not as much as billions of $$$$ of some new drug that may or may not work and by the time the lawsuits come you are rich and retired
There's been a bit of almost Soviet style Lysencoism over the last couple of decades with political appointees over-ruling the scientists that work for them. Put a horse judge in charge and that "heck of a job" just isn't good enough for anything other than judging horses.
But who cares, because because you gotta keep turning that endless publication crank. If you don't you might get kicked off the team.
Just visualize legions of white coated scientists chained to their lab benches/computer screens, pulling a lever to get their jolt of drugs injected directly into their veins. If they don't pull the lever often enough they'll go into seizure and break their own backs through muscle contractions.
But it's all good because uncontrolled competition always produces the best outcome. Just ask any Wall Street banking executive who gets a mountain of money no matter how badly they screw up. Just trust the system and you will be safe, secure and happy. Really.
Why is Snark Required?
Feynman's take:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Two more examples from Ignition! by John Clark.
James Dewar (later Sir James, and the inventor of the Dewar flask and hence of the thermos botde), of the Royal Institute in London, in 1897 liquefied fluorine, which had been isolated by Moisson only eleven years before, and reported that the density of the liquid was 1.108. This wildly (and inexplicably) erroneous value (the actual density is 1.50) was duly embalmed in the literature, and remained there, unquestioned, for almost sixty years, to the confusion of practically everybody.
Bill Doyle, at North American, had also fired a small fluorine motor in 1947, but in spite of these successes, the work wasn't immediately followed up. The performance was good, but the density of liquid fluorine (believed to be 1.108 at the boiling point) was well below that of oxygen, and the military (JPL was working for the Army at that time) didn't want any part of it.
This situation was soon to change. Some of the people at Aerojet simply didn't believe Dewar's 54-year-old figure on the density of liquid fluorine, and Scott Kilner of that organization set out to measure it himself. (The Office of Naval Research put up the money.) The experimental difficulties were formidable, but he kept at it, and in July, 1951, established that the density of liquid fluorine at the boiling point was not 1.108, but rather a little more than 1.54. There was something of a sensation in the propellant community, and several agencies set out to confirm his results. Kilner was right, and the position of fluorine had to be re-examined. (ONR, a paragon among sponsors, and the most sophisticated —by a margin of several parsecs — funding agency in the business, let Kilner publish his results in the open literature in 1952, but a lot of texts and references still list the old figure. And many engineers, unfortunately, tend to believe anything that is in print.)
For years people had noted that a standing drum of acid slowly built up pressure, and had to be vented periodically. But they assumed that this pressure was a by-product of drum corrosion, and didn't think much about it. But then, around the beginning of 1950, they began to get suspicious. They put WFNA in glass containers and in the dark (to prevent any photochemical reaction from complicating the results) and found, to their dismay, that the pressure buildup was even faster than in an aluminum drum. Nitric acid, or WFNA at least, was inherently unstable, and would decompose spontaneously, all by itself. This was a revolting situation.
All of this goes to show that even well-respected scientists and engineers are not immune to bad science.
"Publish or Perish", Degrees that require new original ideas, Strict hierarchy structure...
Academic institutions are culturally stuck in victorian times. So if you want to work up, get the choice projects and research, you need to publish. The more your publish, the higher the chances you will move up. Because there is so much published material, people don't read it much, so they found that they can get credit for half ass work.
Your name becomes your brand, so when you try to get a grant your name+institution you will work for will get you the grant money.
There isn't any reason why Say State University of New York Buffalo can't get a grant to study seismology, but chances are it will go to University of California Berkeley not because they will do a better job, but because of the name.
Finally institutions haven't learned how to deal with today's political climate with the attempt for breaking news. Every Hypothesis is sold to the public as a new Theory... Then if that Hypothesis is shown false (as it is common in science) then the media who may have a political slant will go and say see Science is Wrong again, just like our political stance has predicted!
Science for the most part is quite work, collaborating with like minded people, with checks and balances to try to filter out strong egos. But it has gone commercial so these checks and balances are weaken as strong egos will win out.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Can bad scientific practices be fixed?
I whipped together a quick study that shows that it is completely impossible. I'm sorry, it can't be fixed.
In the case of children's vaccination the medical community would be wise to co-op the language of climate change activists and label the opposition as "vaccine deniers". Shame them as anti-science and anti-medicine. Point out how the anti-vax movement's loudest voices are b-list celebrities with no expertise on the subject.
You are mistaking kicking back against PR agencies, people in politics defining a difference to other people in politics and medicine show "religion" who see science as a threat to their business model for "scientific consensus".
Banding together against the barbarians at the gate who wouldn't know the scientific method if it bit them on the arse is not "scientific consensus" - it is a defence of expertise versus wilful ignorance and deliberate lies.
The problem is that those companies are profit-driven, that means that only profit generating research is done at them. And even so it is mostly short-term focused.
From Ignition! by John Clark:
Another meeting, some years later, had more interesting results. In June 1966, a symposium on fluorine chemistry was held at Ann Arbor and one of the papers, by Professor Neil Bartlett of the University of British Columbia, was to be on the discovery and properties of ONF3. Bartlett, a virtuoso of fluorine chemistry, the discoverer of OIF5 and of the xenon fluorides, had, of course, never heard of Rocketdyne's and Allied's classified research. But Bill Fox, seeing an advance program, hurriedly had his report on the compound declassified, and presented it immediately after Bartlett's, describing several methods of synthesis, and just about every interesting property of the compound. Bill did his best not to make Bartlett look foolish, and Bartlett grinned and shrugged it off—"well, back to the old vacuum rack" — but the incident is something that should be noted by the ivory tower types who are convinced of the intellectual (and moral) superiority of "pure" undirected research to the applied and directed sort.
I think you might need data to support your assertion, since I'm sure we can play anecdote tag all day long. For the record, I have no opinion on the subject, since I don't happen to have data showing whether directed or undirected research is more fruitful.
When 1000's of studies, all done differently, with different data, in different places all come to the same conclusion....you ask for 1001 because, hey, you never know, right? Here's three we can put to bed: the world is not flat, vaccines work well, and smoking causes lung cancer.
No, they were illiterate in the truest sense of the word.
I had students who were unaware that books have page numbers. That's how frequently they cracked a book during twelve years of compulsory education:
I.e., never.
They couldn't read the textbooks. They couldn't read my PowerPoint presentations. They were incapable of following lab manuals -- a complete killer if you're in a systems or network administration class. They detested typing and would not accept my assertion that it's a key skill, one that they'll use continuously in the field.
No, sadly, they are simply illiterate,
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
Really. Atheists have replaced belief in God with belief in science. They hold science up as a truth and clammer to believe that which they hold as absolute truth, when it might not be or more likely is the truth at that moment. People like Myers and Dawkins cast science into a role that science doesn't want, that is, to be our messiah saving us from oh so repressive religions. Now it appears that even scientists are believing it.
So they make money in the process of pushing back the boundaries of science.
What's wrong with that?
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
I have witnessed way too many brilliant, and I mean off the scale brilliant graduate students who are forced to pretty much credit their work to some 60+ year old very tenured professor because he is the only one who can get access to the money. But worse than that I see the same off the scale brilliant students being told that they are wrong wrong wrong. Not because they are wrong but because when they are shown to be correct it will upend the research and conclusions that entire careers were built upon.
I find that many senior professors/scientists never really accomplished anything and simply became experts in an established field further establishing that field. They are threatened by anyone who comes along and shakes the tree which might cause a few of their most rotten fruit to fall. But they are also threatened that if recognized that a truly great young scientist will come along and "steal" all the grant money that is rightfully theirs because of their seniority.
There are the rare senior scientists who encourage new and radical thinking along with making sure that credit is properly assigned (first name) but pretty much without exception these are scientists who accomplished something in their day.
I find a very common song sung by these terrible scientists is that all science is now to be done by groups. Yes groups are often required to conclusively put something new to bed but almost without exception great science had some key crack opened by some one person(or two) thinking way outside the box; not merely going through a checklist.
I have long thought that one of the reasons that so many great scientists are a bit autistic is that only this way can they ignore the continuous social pressure to conform to the groupthink that the lesser scientist would prefer they would. Whereas the more social but less capable scientists are the ones who can rise to the top on little or no accomplishments and cajole and structure the system so as to provide them with a huge cut of the grant money.
Vaccines works - that is well established. They also have risks - so the question usually boils down to "do we save way more lives than we take with this vaccine program?"
We therefore use vaccine against measles, because measles will otherwise be epidemic and kill/maim about 1% of its victims. The vaccine is much safer than the disease.
Also, we don't vaccine everybody against the common cold. The cold runs epidemic every year, but is mostly harmless. Vaccine is available for the unusally vulnerable who might die from getting the cold. There is no gain for normal people though - but still the risks that follow any vaccine like allergy, or the risks of any injection like an unclean needle, bleeding and so on.
Some of you may be visiting that Amazon link and wondering how the hell weilawei ended up spending $1,000 on a book ("Ignition!"). The book is too wonderful to be limited to the big spenders. Search for it online and you will find a PDF easily enough. It's an awesome read.
Cities were better when they were smaller. The internet was better when the entire world wasn't on facebook and twitter. Slashdot was certainly better when they didnt care so much about traffic. Science was more accurate when it was a much smaller. Human nature is to spoil things when you get too many people involved. And it's not a linear. That said, the real question is whether more good science is being done even as the ratio goes down.
I think part of the problem is that nobody wants to publish a paper where the experiment failed--but they should.
Failures are useful; they're not wasted time. You've almost certainly learned something from a failed experiment. Maybe you learned that the setup wasn't rigorous enough, or maybe you just learned that a certain avenue of research wasn't viable for one reason or another. I get that journals are looking for breakthroughs, but it would be so useful to read a paper in your field and find out that someone already tried the thing you're attempting, and now you don't have to fail in exactly the same way.
But that requires a much more collaborative system, and one where the community is interested in finding answers, not glory.
https://scholar.google.ca/scho...
I agree though, the world would be a better place if journalists writing pieces on science were expected to provide references.
Without an agreeable metric for how to declare it to be "fixed", that is an unachievable goal. It is worth noting though that the percentage of bad players in science is no worse than in any other vocation, and indeed lower than many. The difference is just that more media attention goes to unethical science than to drywall installers who cut corners.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There is no vaccine for the common cold, not even for the "unusually vulnerable." There are over 200 different cold viruses. As a kid, you get lots of different colds, as you get older, you get fewer because you've already been exposed to a large cross-section of them. The next generation is going to have much bigger problems because they won't have been exposed to many of them when they were young - kids with colds are not allowed in day cares so nobody else gets exposed, nobody lets their kids play in the mud any more, everything has to be sanitized (like good old soap and water isn't good enough - you have to have an antibacterial soap).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It is not wrong, it just means that valid research that does not generate enough amount of profits is not being done, or if it is it is mostly a PR campaign kind of thing. Things like reducing famine or prosthetics for the disabled.
I agree it's not a problem. As can be seen at Retraction Watch, lots of bad science if found out and retracted. That's a good thing not a bad thing. One could ask how much of published science is made up and undetected but a better question would be how many results are simply crappy in the data or crappy in the analysis. It surely dwarfs the latter. But who cares. If the result is important it will be replicated. if it's not important then no one will cite it.
ultimately it's the well cited articles that also get vetted by reproduction. Those constitute the body of science moving forward. the rest goes into the gutter of history.
In skiing the saying is, if you fall and your fall isn't forward your not being aggressive enough. It's the same in science. People will make errors. If they weren't then then were not paying for aggressive enough research.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In medical research, the problem is that most of it is run by amateurs. Medical doctors receive somewhere between no and very little scientific education, and conduct research in their spare time while not treating patients, yet in North America an MD is considered not only sufficient, but actually desirable for a "clinician scientist." There are some excellent scientists who also hold MDs, but it's secondary to their scientific training. Clinicians have very creative ideas about how to do science.
We all hold up Bell Lab's invention of the transistor as an example of basic research...
Except that it wasn't: The basic researcher was Julius Linenfeld who published and patented the theoretical operating principle of the junction FET in the 1920s. Shockley's team at Bell were trying to build a JFET when they discovered the point-contact transistor. Unfortunately for Linenfeld, the patents expired long before materials science caught up with his math in the 1950s.
Actually there is not a problem with science there is a problem with biomedical research which the author of the article keeps confusing with all science despite actually referring to fields such as particle physics which does not have this problem. That's not to say that we do not have mistakes but these tend to get caught quickly and retracted e.g. faster than light neutrinos.
Except for medical research, I'd say most of science is the same way as particle physics: the odd mistakes which tend to get caught quickly. I don't hear of frequent retractions or contradictions by chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, geologists or even non-medical biologists like you do frequently for medical studies. In fact it is incredibly ironic that an article written by a medical researcher criticizing the poor practices in his field is so inaccurately and carelessly written. This aptly illustrates at least part of their problem.
For a study to be funded, it must be ground-breaking. For a study to break new ground, it must be non-obvious. For it to be non-obvious, it must be, to some degree, counter-intuitive. To be counter-intuitive,it must, to some degree, be illogical (at least from a standard perspective.)
Since scientists can improve their chance of getting funded if they are studying illogical things, there's likely going to be a strong bias toward studying things that aren't true . Some of these things will not b shown to be conclusively wrong, either due to poor design or willful negligence of proper methodology.Unfortunately, this does not get caught by the peer review process, because "peers"can exhibit the same behaviors as movie critics (you can always find one willing to make a positive comment just to see their name in print, or be able to add a line to their vita.)
Because of the proliferation of "journals" in the Internet era, there is a "news cycle" view within the scientific press now, where each publication is trying to be first to report new discoveries.
Preliminary studies that would never have been published in the past are presented in the same format that well-studied research streams were previously, so that the start-up journals can appear to have the same legitimacy as the leaders in the field.
The popular press, desperate for sensational headlines, jumps on these illogical theories with scant research and inconclusive results and treats them like news, simply to fill the requirement for 24-hour reporting.
What we can observe today,with certainty, is there is link between smoking and increased rates of lung cancer. We are still working on understanding cancer.
The problem is that it restricts science to a narrow set of topics. Areas of research that do not have an obvious payout at the end will not be initiated, even though they could provide substantial benefits to humans. Vaccine development is one example of an area of applied research that is not a big money maker and thus not picked up by companies. Basic research where knowledge and understanding is the end product is also not much of a money maker. But, it is important. New genome editing tools are good examples of recent basic research advances that will probably change humanity. This area of research never would start in a company.
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
That has ALWAYS been true. In fact just about the only way to make a name for yourself in science is to show that someone else is wrong about something. Einstein is famous because he showed how Newton was wrong. We put forward hypothesis, test them and (in what should be a surprise to no one) most of them ultimately turn out to be wrong or defective in some way. As a general rule that is both acceptable (to a point) and expected.
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.
Again, why the notion that any of this is somehow new?
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative.
Bullshit they aren't incentivized to be right. Being right is hugely incentivized. The problem is that it is hard to be right about something that is actually complicated and meaningful. So we have to break big problems up into little problems and most of those aren't consequential and many are going to turn out to be wrong or dead ends. Not every bit of science is going to be of world altering importance. Some people are doing some shady things to earn a paycheck and stay in the game but they tend to get found out in due time. Science is remarkably effective in weeding out bad data over time.
Here is a project tracking 10,000+ colorectal cancer patients over 19 + years. https://www.cancercare.on.ca/r...
That project rolls into this project and shares data with 5 other registries. http://epi.grants.cancer.gov/
There is a lot of very good, very detailed very repeatable work out there. Medical research can't generate patients like a physicists can generate electrons, unless you want to induce more cancer in the population...To dismiss this important research out of hand is insulting.
Well I can link to a paper that shows that cigarette smoke contains mutagens, which means that it is directly causing mutations in cell DNA. That is unless you are going to claim that mutagens circulating in the blood stream don't actually cause mutations in cell DNA.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
This has been known for OVER FOUR DECADES you stupid moron. Look at the data on that paper, it's 1974.
The basics are when smoking was first linked to cancer it was statistical inference with unknown mechanisms. That has changed in the intervening decades and the mechanisms are at least partially understood now.
"Publish or Perish", Degrees that require new original ideas, Strict hierarchy structure...
Academic institutions are culturally stuck in victorian times. So if you want to work up, get the choice projects and research, you need to publish. The more your publish, the higher the chances you will move up. Because there is so much published material, people don't read it much, so they found that they can get credit for half ass work.
Your name becomes your brand, so when you try to get a grant your name+institution you will work for will get you the grant money.
There isn't any reason why Say State University of New York Buffalo can't get a grant to study seismology, but chances are it will go to University of California Berkeley not because they will do a better job, but because of the name.
Finally institutions haven't learned how to deal with today's political climate with the attempt for breaking news. Every Hypothesis is sold to the public as a new Theory... Then if that Hypothesis is shown false (as it is common in science) then the media who may have a political slant will go and say see Science is Wrong again, just like our political stance has predicted!
Science for the most part is quite work, collaborating with like minded people, with checks and balances to try to filter out strong egos. But it has gone commercial so these checks and balances are weaken as strong egos will win out.
This reminded me of two things:
1- One of my favorite Roy Scheider lines from 2010: "Look, just because our governments are behaving like asses doesn't mean we have to! We're supposed to be scientists, not politicians!"
and
2- Dr. Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the palm pilot and handspring lines of devices, who is an avid researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, pointed out in his book, On Intelligence, the following about his approach to his interests and career path:
"Frequently hypotheses in the academic environments don't pan out into ground breaking research and as a result can be career enders." This is why he approached his study of neuro-biology to the end of designing and building intelligent machines, to the corporate research and development environment which tends to take more of a "Back to the drawing board" approach to engineering and science programs that don't pan out into discoveries or innovation. This is a much better approach for many obvious reasons, but part of the problem is that academic research is too quick to blame the researcher and not the questions or the actual research or research approach and black list the people involved, which is very much like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It is no surprise that academia has serious problems with the integrity of it's publications (which is the root of the actual problem pointed out here) because they have created an environment where it is profitable or expedient to be less than honest, at least in the short term, if there is one constant in life, it is that nothing remains a secret forever. Academia would do well to reward the actual merits of research that does not pan out into something groundbreaking, because like Edison, it adds to the body of research that can hep to define later research that does pan out into something novel. (like the 1000 tries at finding the appropriate material to use as a filament in the first light bulb and the famous quote "I just found 999 ways not to make a light bulb" before he settled on tungsten.)
There are so many talented scientists and engineers that are unable to find places to apply their talents due to the system that is in place in academia making the process work against itself in this manner. I would say this is why (coming full circle here) we did not actually end up exploring the outer solar system in the last decade. (2000 - 2010)
Double-blind studies are standard practice for studies. So why not do the same with funding? Donors to a university don't get to pick and choose which researcher or topic of research will get the money (but it has to be guaranteed to go to research and not into the general fund). The researchers' funding is allocated by some random method and they don't know in advance how much they will get if any nor do they know where the money came from.
If I remember correctly, the scientists were saying that they MEASURED faster than light neutrinos, and were soliciting community aid in figuring out what was going on. They weren't confident at all of their results.
It's arguable that if they hadn't published their measurements, it would have taken a lot longer for them to have got the help which resolved the issue.
Did I just make a case for knowingly publishing results which are very likely wrong? Does it in fact boil down to simple honesty from the scientist about the likely validity of his claims/observations?
Even in the biomed area: "The subject study is admittedly small, however, if the results can be firmly established in a larger study, then significant medical benefits will accrue...."
--PM
And your problem is?
Why should poor people be funding scientists to carry out research that costs more than the benefits?
I work in psychiatry research, analyzing and maintaining the sexy fMRI neuroimaging data. I also write the storage and analysis database that we use. The database usage has been growing exponentially as data sharing projects have started and the NIH has mandated data sharing. In other words, my workload of maintaining this software system has also grown exponentially. What my PIs do not understand is that software is not at all like scientific papers. Once one of their analysts (or post-docs) writes a paper and gets its past reviewers, its done. If there is a major or minor flaw, chances are good that no one will notice or say anything.
It's completely different with software engineering. If there is a tiny bug, people will notice. Having transitioned from analyst to programmer, my work is viewed entirely differently. If the papers published from workplace underwent the same scrutiny that the software does, we would produce much more robust science.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
No, it can not. The problem is science long ago became a buzzword and has since been used for many things which is not science at all. The entire scientific process is about observations and experimentation and developing repeatable and predictable experiments which can be used to prove or disprove theories which are used to explain the behavior. If you can't create a repeatable and predictable experiment then it's not really science.
This isn't to say that theories can not be used to potentially explain past events and much of science is done trying to do just that, but as soon as you make a claim that some past event *MUST* have been caused by some previous event you have left the realm of science. It may be the best theory and there may not be any other understood cause but unless you have a reliable observation you can never be certain. Therefore much of science is also based on assumptions which is fine as long as you understand that they are just that... they are unproven assumptions.
It gets more complicated when theories build on each other because while it can be very helpful it is often easy to lose sight of the base assumptions or worse get into cases where your basis of support is a circular argument that theory A proves Theory B which proves theory A though almost never as simple as two theories.
Slight correction: Edison settled on carbonized bamboo filament (and he wasn't the first to use a carbon filament). The tungsten filament lamp came several years later, and not from Edison.
But the kind of science you want is also not occurring in academic labs. It will never again occur in academic labs, because academics has been undermined by the multiple generations of decreasingly literate students.
For details of the long-term problem, see The Happy Days Ahead by Robert A. Heinlein.
(One thing to keep in mind about Heinlein: he was a compulsive newspaper-clipper. That is to say that he would clip newspaper articles about a subject and file them away. By the time he wrote The Happy Days Ahead, he had about 50 years' newspaper clippings on the subject. He could cite long-term trends in education, with the decades of clippings to back it up.)
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
"Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right."
Yeah, bullshit. A significant mistake will permanently cripple a young scientists career, if not outright end it.
46 & 2
That's exactly what scientists should be doing, re-testing long held dogma taking advantage of state of the art equipment. It's a human endeavor, so sometimes they'll make mistakes. The scientists who reported the results presented plenty of caveats, but nobody listened.
Quoting this, as it's an AC zero-karma thing that most will miss, and I don't have mod points today.
This time, AC gets it mostly right. Science is about reproducibility. Opera had a weird result that they didn't understand, so they did what they were supposed to: put it out there for people to crosscheck. For what it's worth, in an emacs buffer open in another window at this very moment, I'm putting the final touches on the paper about one of the results that WAS this crosscheck. (yeah, it's taken us too long to send it to the journal, but it's a) careful, fiddly work that we want to get right; and b) we all know the answer now so enthusiasm for the paper writing process/grind isn't huge).
So, what the parent post got right: this is exactly how science is supposed to work. What the parent post got wrong: everybody (in the field) carefully listened to the caveats. Doing so is how one finds the flaws! Or eliminates possible flaws, as is sometimes the case. It was the media who went tangential on the whole process, not the scientists.
This is a general problem in science (not just biomedical research). I'm a physicist, and we see the same sorts of issues.
It all comes down to how academic research is funded and judged: number of papers, number of students graduated, and amount of money raised. Inside granting agencies, this is how different research efforts are compared to determine which programs get (more) funding and who gets cut. The importance of the work, the correctness of the work, and the ethical behavior (or not) of the researchers are not considered. Scientists are not stupid, if those are the metrics used to determine funding, they optimize for those things.
If we want to fix science we need a different set of metrics.
I'd suggest replacing the three metrics above with: number of validated results, public interest, and amount of private investment in the work. This would apply specifically to government granting programs.
"Validated results" requires a third party to validate, that should be government labs validating academic/commercial work (we're talking about reviews of government grants) and the opposite for new work done at government labs.
"Public interest" is much easier to track now than it used to be. A simple metric would just be google search ranking (although I'm sure something better could be used).
Private investment may seem overly commercial to some people, but we have a big problem right now with a lack of development of scientific work. Last year was the first time since 2000 that private investment in startup companies exceeded government investment in basic research (in the US). Commercialization is much more expensive than basic research; we're still only passing on a fraction of the potential practical work. We need to motivate people doing basic research to work more with industry (where appropriate, right). In addition, you have several diseases (usually "orphans") where private donations for disease research are greater than government investment (i.e. Lyme disease). Maybe that's fine, but the granting folks need to take a look at why that is and whether they're really investing public dollars where they need to go.
Lastly, I would change the system every 10 years or so. The longer any set metric is used, the more likely it is that people are gaming the system rather than working in the public interest.
Measles vaccine effectiveness is one that is specifically in doubt.
Having looked at this problem, I note that before and after the measles vaccine was introduced, we saw a three order of magnitude drop in US measles cases with similar declines in other countries, correlating with the introduction of measles vaccines in those countries. There's just too much of an effect to hand wave away with the assertion that the world no longer practices measles parties as much as it used to or with the other assertions you make.
Also, lab tests were developed and began being introduced at the same time as the vaccines that only verify 100/25,0000 of suspected cases. A suspect case of measles is not a case of measles. It is not even a diagnosis of measles. It is a case where doctor is covering their ass for a measles-like illness by ordering the test. There is no reason today to expect a "suspected case of measles" in the developed world to have a high likelihood of being a case of measles, especially with the extremely rare incidence of measles. There is no actual evidence here that doctors have a high likelihood of misdiagnosing measles.
You know, this stuff has been explained to you before and yet you continue with your erroneous assertions. When are you going to listen to reason?
The MMR vaccine fiasco is of course the classic example of this; there are still people acting on the assumption that the lies were true, and that's getting people killed.
Do you think the fiasco was caused by bad science, bad journalism, or bad politician?
Oliver.
Just reward those who find flaws in the published literature. If I can get a PhD for calling "bullshit" when I spot it, I'll be a *much* more attentive reader.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Papers get 'impact scored'. Based on the number of times they are cited by other papers, especially other high impact papers. Basically Google page rank for papers. If Google ever tried to patent 'page rank', scientific papers 'impact scores' are prior art. It's even done 'on the internet'.
Not surprisingly, this is also gamed.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
First, the gold standard of scientific proof is experimentation.
Uh... there's a lot more to science than that. But even if we take your word for it, the climatologists create statistical models based on observable variables and fit those models to collected data. The better the fit, the more accurate the predictions.
One issue with academia is that all research must be the stated hypothesis is confirmed, i.e. a negative hypothesis result is not considered valuable. Even though the elimination of a degree of freedom from consideration for further study is one of the cornerstones of science. Instead, everyone must make something new and groundbreaking.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
The problem is that the people who are the anti-vaxers are the vary same people who carry the Global Warming torch the highest and are most vocal in the popular media.
Yeah, people like Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann are poster children for "people who carry the Global Warming torch".
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Handwaves ("dark matter") and faddism exist in many disciplines, but what the article focuses on is biomedicine. Perhaps it's time to supplement those crappy, glacier-slow double blind medical studies with something that makes better use of the incredible data processing resources available to us in the new century. Let's develop a supercomputer model of human biology detailed enough that we can test large numbers of pharma possibilities against it. This would enable us to zero in on cures a lot faster and respond to epidemiological emergencies like the Ebola crisis in a more timely manner.
Can we hope for a Moore's law in medicine?
I'm not interesting in indulging your political biases as they are not relevant in this case... which is typical since they're rarely relevant. Though you do seem determined to inflict them on everyone.
I am not saying the corporate labs are great. I'm just saying that the science rot we're seeing is not coming out of the corporate labs.
I gave a theory as to why that was... you won't like that because you think all things corporate are evil. So lets not get into that. But the problem of bad science is concentrated quite strongly in universities and government funded labs. That is simply a fact. We could go over the last 10 or so science scandals and they'd all be from those labs.
Now am I saying that government labs are inherently bad?
Not at all. And since it is your misapprehension in this matter to kneejerk in that direction, I am correcting that and telling you very plainly that I have no problem with government labs.
However, there are some problems coming out of them and some reform would be in the interest of everyone. Especially the government labs because if they do not reform their credibility is going to start to take hits.
I can go through a big list of issues where various scientific departments have been coopted by politicians etc and which dramatically damages the credibility of the department.
I'll leave you with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Given that we only have one earth, this is a problem.
Without taking sides on the actual issue, are you telling us you can't imagine experiments that don't require the whole planet, or that couldn't be repeated? Really?
Just another day in Paradise
If I remember correctly, the scientists were saying that they MEASURED faster than light neutrinos, and were soliciting community aid in figuring out what was going on.
Not quite. They claimed evidence of FTL neutrinos and then tried to hedge their bet by asking for external experts to come and investigate to confirm. In fact a good proportional of the collaboration refused to sign the paper which is a very sure sign that you are on incredibly dodgy ground: if you cannot convince the vast majority of your fellow collaborators that the result is right you are unlikely to convince others and it should be a very clear message that you need to do more checks and get more data.
The null hypothesis is the assumption that things don't have a relationship. That is because far more things are not related than are. The size of my shoes is not related to the velocity of the solar wind. The frequency of web forum posts is not related to the life span of dolphins. Pick any two random measurable things, and they will not be related in any provable fashion most of the time. That's why it's so interesting when things are related. The whole point of any scientific research is to disprove the null hypothesis, i.e. prove correlation, for some set of data. If you want to do away with it, you will send us back to the dark ages, where adultery causes fishing shortages, and Jews cause the plague.
But note that the climate screamers and shamers are not the scientists themselves but political activists acting on what they think are the scientists' findings.
Do you mean like Hansen, Mann and Gleick?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
He was a Gastroenteritis, a Medical Doctor looking to market a competing measles vaccine, in short the Anti-vaxers believe that "Big Phara" is out to get profits above their children's welfare, based on the results obtained by "Big Pharma" out to get their profits at the expense of their children and lost his license to practise as a result of his avarice.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'm just saying that the science rot we're seeing is not coming out of the corporate labs.
Corporate labs have a very different incentive system, and at least in most areas of the biomedical sciences, they publish far less in peer-reviewed journals. What they do publish will usually be better vetted, but this comes at the expense of taking much longer - because, of course, their scientists aren't dependent on (rapid) publication for career advancement. (The issue of applied vs. directed research is a separate problem - very few companies can afford to do truly undirected basic research.) There are certainly things that could be changed about academia to mitigate the problem; the current system of grad students and postdocs doing most of the work in academia is a disaster. (I say this as someone who has spent more than a decade in this system.)
Where you err is assuming that you can simply weed out the bad actors through some kind of personality test. Contrary to your supposition, very few people go into academic research for any impure motivation, and it isn't simply a problem with the people in power. Much of the fraud and incompetence is produced by junior researchers who aren't rich or famous or powerful, and are motivated solely by the need to advance to the next stage in their careers. And there are plenty of examples of people who are motivated in part by "money or power or attention", but also manage to do excellent science at the same time. (Craig Venter is one obvious example, but there are plenty of pure academics who are equally ego-driven.) But in general, everyone following this career path is fundamentally interested in and excited by science, otherwise they would have become doctors or bankers.
My philosophy has always been that once having passed the bar of qualification, a scientist should be left alone, career-wise, to have peace, and time to think and experiment, and time to try and fail with impunity. And these time chunks need to be on the order of 5 years or so.
The current system is optimized to produce incremental advances by scientific worker-drones. It is not designed to produce important new insights or confidently well tested important results.
It is way more expensive to waste scientific talent on bureacracy, grant application toil and stress, and writing of interim cruft than it would be to just let the people friggin' work unmolested using their own best judgement and wisdom about what to work on and at what pace and priority.
Scientists are, or are before it is beat out of them, all highly self-motivated, DRIVEN people with unique interests and insights.
Take off the reigns.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Once you have a doctorate you are qualified to doctor the data.
That was the definition of doctorate I was taught.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Grant writing has always had an element of 'trend following marketing' involved.
It's like grants are being given out by the South Park secret girls club: 'It sparkles'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It will never again occur in academic labs, because academics has been undermined by the multiple generations of decreasingly literate students.
The students you describe don't end up in academic labs, at least not for any job more important than cleaning glassware. Everyone doing real work already has a BS degree at a minimum, and most of them either hold PhDs or are in graduate programs. (Also, a huge fraction of them are immigrants, at least in the US.) Some of them are pretty sloppy nonetheless, but there's absolutely not a surplus of semi-literate scientists in academic research (as opposed to small technical colleges).
After a serious grounding in statistics, you throw the class at a load of scientific articles - by the barrow load - and get them to spot the howlers for the term paper. Then submit the results to the publishing journals...
Right, I'm in the humanities and there is this running joke that you only need to publish one really bad and obviously flawed paper on a really popular topic, and your career is certain. It's true, one bad paper, a followup book that is even worse published at 'prestigious' publisher like Oxford UP*, and you will get cited everywhere and get full tenure within about 3 years after the book has been published. I swear I'm not kidding, I've seen this more than once.
So much for impact scores and citation indices ...
-----
* I mention this publisher because he's well respected and nevertheless publishes many bad or at least dubious books without a proper peer review. I should know, because they once contacted me, a lowly postdoc from an unknown university, to review the latest book project by one of the most famous researchers in my area. It's obvious that they just googled me, as I'm easier to find on the net than some of my more established colleagues.
The MMR vaccine fiasco is of course the classic example of this;
How so? It seems, instead, to present a counter-argument. I would refer you to the comments of Richard Horton, of the Lancet. To wit:
"But there are fair questions to be asked about the style of government and expert response to claims about the safety of MMR. Three reactions have been discernable. First, there has been an appeal to evidence. The Department of Health's www.mmrthefacts.nhs.uk website contains a superb collection of materials designed to help parents make the “decision in your own time and on your own terms”. The difficulty is that in a post-BSE era, where government advice is no longer immediately taken on trust, the weight of accumulated evidence carries less force if it comes from government than it once did.
Second, public-health officials have disparaged as “poor science” evidence that appears to contradict their official message. This approach has a cost. The reason that today's retraction is partial and not total is that the discovery of a possible link between bowel disease and autism is a serious scientific idea, as recognised by the MRC,8 and one that deserves further investigation. Although dismissing the entire 1998 Lancet paper as poor science gives a clear and correct message to the public about the status of any claim regarding the safety of MMR, in scientific and clinical terms it is both wrong and damaging. The autism-bowel disease link was considered part of a series of physiological observations judged by the MRC to be “interesting and in principle worth investigating”. Subsequent research has yielded conflicting findings.13, 14 This work should be supported.
Third, there has been an effort to starve critics of legitimacy by refusing to engage them face-to-face."
there are still people acting on the assumption that the lies were true, and that's getting people killed.
There were no "lies", only misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misrepresentations OUTSIDE of the scientific community, and a failure to disclose associations and funding on the part of ONE of the many researchers, which turned out to be irrelevant to any of the research conducted or findings reported.
Further, I think you would be as hard-pressed to show a direct causal link between any specific refusal of the MMR vaccine and any specific death as researchers have been to show a causal link between any specific vaccine and autistic enterocolitis.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
In their quest for telling a compelling story, ... retrofit hypotheses to fit their data.
Can someone tell me how this isn't just unseemly science rather than bad science? Sure it might seem like you are "cheating", but if the data tells you something that you didn't expect going in and you change your hypothesis along the way, you still are presenting data and you simply just took a shortcut publishing your second paper and just tossed-out your initial attempt at writing a paper.
To me, bad science would be cherry-picking your data to fit your original hypothesis (or perhaps your ideology or world view).
As to your points on the corporate labs, you're still agreeing that the issue is not the corporate labs. So we can comfortably focus on where the issue lies.
I'm not interested in the excuses for it. I want constructive solutions. Finger pointing, shrugging, and other political horseshit is not in the common interest.
As to personality screening, no... I did not specify how I would screen people. I said what my intention with the screening would be but I did not offer a method.
The distinction would be saying you want to kill someone versus saying you want to snipe them in the face with a high powered sniper rifle using a trained marksman in a ghili suit.
or saying you want to eat some food versus saying you want to eat at that new french place and eat the muscles you like so much.
See the difference? What you did was take my statement that I wanted to screen out people with poor integrity and inferred a method by which I would do that.
I stated no method.
Ideally, we should try a few different methods and see which of them has empirically results. That is always a nice way to do things but it is especially fitting for this context. So the method should be something that is empirically proven to actually work under repeatable circumstances.
if you'd like me to suggest something I'd like to try first... okay.
1. The barium meal test. This is done in intelligence circles. The idea is to leak little bits of information to various people but to leak totally different bits of information. And when the bad information is leaked to the enemy you know who leaked it because you only gave it to that one person. In science we could do a reverse barium meal system where we could make it seem like it would be very easy to get away with some kind of academic fraud that wouldn't be found but the whole thing would be a set up or a sting. You could have certain bits of research that should be followed up on to be cited properly provided. And when they use them and don't realize the citation is entirely fictitious... that could be a nice way of figuring out if people are actually making any kind of effort. You could put bogus references in the literature that are known to be bad. And then when you see them cited you know that the person did not actually read what they're citing but rather copied a citation from somewhere else and applied it.
2. The IRS subjects a largely random set of returns to intensive audits. There can be red flags that will trigger audits regardless but a certain number of seemingly innocent returns are subjected to audits. It is not practical to go through every study and every paper with a fine toothed comb. However, you can do it with a small number of them. If you randomly select a small number to this kind of audit it increases the perceived risk of fraud because whether or not you'll be audited will not be predictable.
I have a lot of other ideas with prove track records in criminal investigations, fraud prevention, and covert counter intelligence.
I am not a stupid person and I am not ignorant.
I should stress again that I have no firm solutions here because I would need to actually do some experimentation with various ideas before I had real confidence in any specific approach. Anything I hung my hat on would have empirical confirmation of effectiveness.
And assuming I had that... how could you possibly argue against an approach that was proven to work?
The only thing I am asking for is the ability to TRY to fix it.
Saying nothing can be done is something you neither can know and is also not productive because it is just defeatist pessimism.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If a methodology is flawed, it is not scientific. It is not of the Scientific method. That is not to say that science sometimes gets it wrong. But if inadequate sample size, sloppy experimentation practices, lazy peer review, financial agenda confirmation, lack of experiment repeatability, etc. are part of the process, it's not science.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Mann is somewhat of an outlier, but I don't see Gleick and Hansen pushing to strip dissenters of their credentials and their jobs. I also don't see them writing off every proposed solution and insisting that only a Stone Age existence will satisfy the climate god.
Careful! You're get foo-foo'ed by someone reward-seeking professional paper-pusher who can't even tell you what a confidence score is or why it's important in their data..
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Climate scientists have been making predictions for decades. Compare their predictions with what actually happened.
Kruschke and Liddell have a preprint out on this topic:
"The Bayesian New Statistics: Two Historical Trends Converge"
Jeez that kind of thinking is the same kind of thinking some used to send disabled people to death camps...
I speak of public universities only. Private universities and corporations can do whatever they want. But if you're taking the public coin then the public has a right to insist on integrity.
The vast majority of research in private universities is government funded, so your public/private university distinction is pretty meaningless. Further, corporations have been eschewing in-house labs in favor of utilizing university labs for some time now.
Simply cutting the sophists off from public funding should largely solve the problem.
So your solution to the problem of bad science is to get rid of bad scientists. Brilliant!
Of course, you have to actually propose a process to eliminate the sophist fungus from the halls of academia - a process that is better than the one currently in place - before you get to claim you've solved anything. Do you know of some test that differentiates a sophist poser from a bona fide scientist?
There is a great deal of evidence that smoking in some way increases the risks of lung cancer. I don't think there's much room to deny that.
BUT, now look at nicotine use without smoking. Look at all the studies that have the test group smoking and yet claim to draw conclusions about nicotine use.
It's very hit and miss in medicine and we sometimes spend billions on the misses (and then wonder why the U.S. has the world's most expensive healthcare but only achieves mediocre results).
That's a great point. I also think it means at the current level and depth of knowledge we need to refine what it means to have a correlation.
From http://www.wired.com/2013/02/b...: 'Well, if I generate (by simulation) a set of 200 variables — completely random and totally unrelated to each other — with about 1,000 data points for each, then it would be near impossible not to find in it a certain number of “significant” correlations of sorts. But these correlations would be entirely spurious.'
Probably 'significance' needs to be larger the higher the number of variables in the system.
As long as you admit to being AC trolls, you've conceded the position to me and from my perspective... I win.
First off, I've explained to YOU several times that my mod points don't matter to me.
Second, people that CAN"T be modded up or down, don't get to talk about other people's mod points.
Unlike you, I actually care about ACTUALLY being right. This is an alien concept to people like you. It means I don't care about what you say or do unless it impacts the argument. Nothing else matters to me.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Or in the case of the last 18 years the worse the fit the (according to the climate change denier deniers) the better.
If it fits its good. If it doesn't fit it is still good. Trust us. The models will work. Even though we used to say 15 years with no temperature increase would invalidate them, we now realize we where wrong. It will take more like 50 years to invalidate them. Really. The science is good. Really really good. Because the models tell us that the science is good.
Well first off, proposing that objective is not meaningless because we're currently not even trying. My objective is literally driving unethical scientists out of the field. That is not something that is actively done.
Second off, I did actually propose some ideas to someone else in this thread and suggested a method of determining effectiveness.
I find this notion that I have to give you a complete proven system gift wrapped for you or I have no valid input to be essentially fallacious. My point and general objective is neither correct nor incorrect if I do not propose a complete system.
I do not need to do that to be right or wrong.
If you'd like a summary of some of my ideas... I'd like to apply FBI fraud and IRS audit tactics to some of these papers. The FBI tactics involve traps. You put out something that an unethical or lazy scientist will slurp up and use in a paper. When it is cited, you humiliate them as using a bogus source.
It should be convincing enough and in the university library and databases so it appears to be real UNTIL you actually read the source. IF you read the source and actually check it, then you'll see it is shit. But you can have it referenced in various places so it seems valid. The point will be to try and get lazy scientists that don't actually read material but read what someone else said about something and then reference the original source when they've never consulted the original source.
This is something the FBI does with stings. You set up some bait and you wait until someone bites.
The IRS randomly subjects a percentage of returns to intensive audits. Do the same thing with the papers and studies. You can subject any study or paper to an audit if you get red flags but the idea here is on top of that to audit some entirely randomly. This increases the risk factor because a deep examination of the paper or study will not be predictable.
There are other ideas as well. But what we're basically dealing with here is fraud.
Fraud is something we have methods of dealing with and various organizations have systems they've developed. Even CIA counter intelligence tactics should be looked at. The idea is to get the fraudsters to stand out.
The best method is basically to get them to self select. You do something that a fraudster will respond to differently than an honest scientist.
And if you didn't get enough evidence to crucify him on the first pass then you don't even let him know you found him. Instead, you subject him to a second round opportunities to incriminate himself.
Because no one is being convicted of a crime in a court of law... the entrapment laws etc do not even begin to apply.
There are many ways to find unethical people. It isn't that hard, chum. You just have to make ANY effort. Apply the same cunning an illiterate fur trapper uses to catch his pray and you'll actually be doing quite well. You must be patient, methodical, and determined.
I'll leave you with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Hansen, Mann and Gleick have proved themselves to be (very good) political activists first and scientists a (distant) second.
Total budget for doing absolutely everything the IPCC says we ought to do about climate science ? You say "trillions of dollars" but that's just a big scary number without context.
Actual context ? It comes down to 0.02% of the global GDP over 20 years (for which the budget was calculated).
That's about 2 orders of magnitude LESS than we'll spend on fossil fuels over the same period (without counting subsidies).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
We're not talking about fucking one of your committee members slutty daughters.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When I challenged you to quote me, I was challenging you to show what I said that provoked his rude comment.
You have just conceded that I was right and his comment came without provocation. I responded to his rude comment with a rude comment. Complaining about getting a rude comment to a rude comment is hypocritical.
morons.
*rolls eyes at the fucktard ACs.*
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>Make no mistake..."Climate Change" is an agenda driven science with a predetermined outcome.
Even if that was true, which it is not, that wouldn't make the results wrong or false.
Frankly everything you say is completely irrelevant. Those things matter to academics. They are details that ONLY matter to academics - they have no political or business impact whatsoever.
In terms of policy only this part matters:
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas ? We've had proof of that since the mid 19th century.
If it is, and we know it is, then it means that increasing CO2 levels = less energy leaving the earth.
Does less energy leaving mean things get hotter ?
Well there you go - either prove that the ENTIRETY of chemistry is bunk, or disprove thermodynamics and conservation of energy.
You need both those to be ENTIRELY false, not a single shred of truth to them - for global warming to be false.
Which would be ironic because it means that for global warming to be false, all the stuff the deniers are defending would have to be false too - if global warming really was false, fossil fuels would be utterly worthless since neither power plants nor internal combustion engines would WORK if we were THAT wrong about chemistry and thermodynamics.
And besides - all that stuff you said are lies, told to you by professional liars - the SAME professional liars who spent years telling you smoking was healthy and lead in the air was both natural and harmless. They are very, very good at lying, and you are very, very gullible.
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Pretty much everything you just said applies to an equal or greater degree to the theory of evolution. Do you also think THAT isn't science enough ?
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That's a really, really stupid thing to say since you are completely ignoring how many WOULD have died without the vaccine.
That's not hard to calculate - and it's a LOT more than 100...
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"Is CO2 a greenhouse gas ? We've had proof of that since the mid 19th century"
Untrue. It was hypothesized by Arrhenius but then Robert Wood showed that greenhouses do not warm because of the "greenhouse effect"
"If it is, and we know it is, then it means that increasing CO2 levels = less energy leaving the earth."
Bunk. Even if CO2 worked the way you think, the effect would be logarithmic, not linear. In any case, studies of ice cores have shown consistently that CO2 enrichment is a centuries delayed response to climate warming, never preceding that warming.
"Well there you go - either prove that the ENTIRETY of chemistry is bunk, or disprove thermodynamics and conservation of energy"
Untrue. Your poor grasp of science is not an excuse for anyone else to believe it. Despite CO2 rising during the 20th and early 21st Century, temperatures have risen, fallen, risen and now stabilized for more than 18 years.
"And besides - all that stuff you said are lies, told to you by professional liars - the SAME professional liars who spent years telling you smoking was healthy and lead in the air was both natural and harmless"
Again, hyperbolic nonsense. But why let facts get in the way of your millenarian beliefs?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
The predictions are bunk. Already climate models have no predictive power whatsoever.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
it was a perfect storm. The original paper had only one author come out against the MMR, and originally, before he probably realized how much money he could make becoming a vaccine denier, he only came out against the triple vaccine and suggested reverting to individual ones until further study was done. Then of course he realized a fool and his money can be easily parted, and he became a real issue. Had he not walked down that path, and stuck to only saying the triple may be problematic and moving back to the individuals was fine, he wouldn't have been quite as ostracized.
Considering how troubled the MMR triple roll out was (see problems with the vaccine in Japan for example, a strain issue) it compounded an already worrisome issue. And of course, Measles had been mostly removed from the population as the inidividual vaccine had been around quite a while, and a generation of parents hadn't experienced it, so when the triple hit in the early 90s, it was a "new" vaccine for a disease people hadn't experienced in decades.
A lot contributed to the fear mongering, and now lots of bad information exacerbates the problem.
> In any case, studies of ice cores have shown consistently that CO2 enrichment is a centuries delayed response to climate warming, never preceding that warming.
Aww you read a little research and didn't understand what it meant. That's cute. No those studies did NOT show what you think it showed, in fact they showed the exact opposite - ice cores are one of the strongest pieces of evidence FOR climate change theory, if they were radically disproving it - you really think thousands of scientists across thousands of disparate fields would ALL have missed that... yet somehow YOU saw it ?
>Despite CO2 rising during the 20th and early 21st Century, temperatures have risen, fallen, risen and now stabilized for more than 18 years.
This is about climate, not temperatures - climate is an AVERAGE and the average has CONSISTENTLY gone up - and there is no pause, just more lies you believe and misrepresentations of scientific results which actually prove the opposite of what you've been told they proved.
>Again, easily verifiable historical fact.
FTFY.
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You can easily verify it's true - you obviously have internet access.
Kids drugged out on cold medicines don't drive cars or operate heavy equipment. Also, do you want adults taking 5-10 sick days just for colds?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If people were proposing massive new taxes, etc. based on Darwinism, I would be looking for more evidence. As it stands, who cares? I mean, when Darwin was alive, it was thought that life regularly spontaneously erupted. Pasteur proved that to be not the case, and in fact, mankind has never seen this theorized phenomena. The theory of cellular structure was infantile in Darwin's day; they simply had no concept of the extreme complexity of the simplest of life forms. Now that we know some of his underlying assumptions were pure poppycock, I am sure you can agree we can cast some healthy skepticism Darwin's way.
Great, that's not what we're discussing.
Just another day in Paradise
Very much this. The assumption is that papers only cite good research, but is something is really off, I have personally cited papers saying that the people that wrote it have no clue (with evidence of course). I have very rarely seen it done by other authors though, but that may be due to my field (CS).
The other thing is that if you do good research and explore interesting side-aspects, you are never getting a permanent academic position. Those go exclusively to people with a lot of publications (which is a bad sign in itself...). The system promotes bad scientists into positions where they can do and supervise more bad science. It is really a complete mess. And I do understand why so many industrial CS people have an utter disdain for published research, most of it is just so terribly bad it is staggering. To make matters worse, much of these terribly bad publications look good on the surface as that is required to get them accepted. But I have found outright fraudulent publications at Tier-1 conferences, misleading ones and ones that claimed findings without any proof whatsoever. I also know several people that should have their PhD removed, because they did not have the results they claimed they had. They were just clever enough to publish in a venue where the reviewers were impressed by the names on the paper or the writing, but failed to spot the often subtle but critical errors. (No, anonymous review does not help. People that want to benefit from the names of their advisors just publish a technical report that is the same as the paper and make sure Google finds it. Many reviewers even at first-rate conferences are too lazy to do a real review and instead first check whether they can identify the authors and just decides on the names if they are successful.)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You failed to express what you intended to prove with the anecdote. By just cutting and pasting it can be taken in many ways.
That aside, we have plenty of examples of non-micromanaged research being fruitful, such as the Bell labs one above, which is enough to indicate that at least SOME of it should be done.
It turned out to be better to develop the internal combustion engine than just focusing on breeding a better horse.
I'll spell it out for you. You said that academic labs performing undirected research will show up and eat the lunch of labs performing directed research. I posted a quote which gave one example of a situation where undirected research was beaten to the punch by directed research.
How hard is that to comprehend? Further, I stated that we could keep coming up with these anecdotes all day long. I'm sure you can find situations in which the opposite happened.
My point is this: you supplied no data, therefore your argument is anecdotal at best.
Really, how complicated is that concept?
If you see the above as being related to political bias in any way then I can only conclude that you have a truly fucked up worldview that sees political bias everywhere - and your projection of than onto me and my comment above is deeply insulting.
Now that is completely out of left field and fighting words. I'm supposed to find myself evil for working with applied science in private enterprise? How dare you build such a ridiculous strawman in my name.
Also if you are depending on an unidentified youtube link to express what you cannot yourself, well that's about ten shades of pathetic isn't it? Can't even bother to write three words to distinguish it from a goatse link - why bother at all?
Sweet :-) Download link here.
Caption from the first photo: "This is what a test firing should look like. Note the mach diamonds in the exhaust stream."
Thanks for the idea of searching for a download, I'm looking forward to reading this.
One person I know spent thirty years getting to the top of his field to be stuck doing mechanical testing of very minor variations of polycarbonate to use in artificial limbs which were all known to be inferior to a version that could no longer be patented. It was a total waste of time, especially since the competition was either using the superior unpatentable version or developing completely different polymers, which they can of course patent just like the minor variations in polycarbonate.
So that's the tight focus of "we need another polycarbonate we can patent" versus "we need a material to do job X". There's not a lot of the latter and there needs to be at least a bit of the latter to avoid someone else coming in to take over your field.
Quote where I wrote about "academic labs performing undirected research" and not the strawman in your head stating it.
If Bell labs was "academic" you can eat MY lunch, delivered by a supermodel if you desire.
Right, I'm in the humanities and there is this running joke that you only need to publish one really bad and obviously flawed paper on a really popular topic, and your career is certain. It's true, one bad paper, a followup book that is even worse published at 'prestigious' publisher like Oxford UP*, and you will get cited
We're talking abourt science, not the humanities.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Then why did you jump in with your strawman attack game?
I'm sorry I didn't just roll over and feed you ego, but I'm not playing some silly game here like you are with your offtopic "ivory tower" insults.
WTF is it with this childish shit, don't you have video games to play instead of putting words in the mouths of others?
Well first off, proposing that objective is not meaningless because we're currently not even trying.
What makes you think nobody's trying...just because one guy (Richard Horton) is complaining of shoddy practices in one specific field of study (biomedical research)? Are Horton's limited complaints reason enough for you to believe that the rest of scientific research is rife with unethical/fraudulent scientists, and that nobody is policing them?
I find this notion that I have to give you a complete proven system gift wrapped for you or I have no valid input to be essentially fallacious
That may be your notion, but it's not mine. I said nothing about you supplying a "complete proven system" to me or anyone else.
If you'd like a summary of some of my ideas...[snip]
I believe your summary can be boiled down to "let's try using some law enforcement techniques in order to expose fraudulent scientists, then we can publish a fraudster shitlist which will shame them out of the profession". Presumably, you believe that this will result in better science across the board - not just in the limited case of Richard Horton's perceived problems within the biomedical field.
Without addressing the merits of your proposal, I'd argue that your assumptions aren't valid. Primarily, you seem to assume that the root cause of a major portion of the bad science out there is unethical/fraudulent behavior by research scientists. There is nothing in TFA/TFS to support this assumption. Richard Horton never mentions ethics or fraud as being a problem in biomedical research. He lists sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, flagrant conflicts of interest, and the pursuit of fashionable trends as the causes of "bad" science. You seem to have determined that unethical behavior and fraud are the main threats to "good" science all by yourself.
This story is NOT about fraud or unethical behavior causing anything. This story is about the failures of peer review, inadequate statistical criteria, poor research methodology, conflicts of interest, laziness and incompetence. You are injecting fraud/ethics into the discussion without providing the slightest bit of evidence to support your claim.
There are many ways to find unethical people. It isn't that hard, chum. You just have to make ANY effort.
Well old buddy old pal, I suppose all those research institutions (and all those granting bodies) with research integrity departments are just providing busywork for bureaucrats, right?
Healthy scepticism is trusting the evidence - and this is why modern evolutionary theory has changed quite a few things about Darwin's original theory, the crux of it is intact. And the social upheaval it caused at the time was, in fact, MUCH larger than what climate change is demanding - at a time when religion was fundamentally woven into the political process all over the world - it threatened that religion to the core.
There's a reason creationists are STILL going crazy over it, but they aren't being scientific.
You're not BEING A healthy sceptic - you're being a denier and by your own admission just now, your reasoning is pure argumentum-ad-consequentum - an outright fallacy. Scepticism is wanting evidence and ACCEPTING it when it's presented - and changing your mind for NEW evidence.
This has allowed evolutionary theory to be refined and improved over time - but those refinements never replaced the theory, they merely improved it. Climate science is the most scrutinized science on earth, because well funded opponents are desperate for any way to discredit it - scientific or not. Like evolutionary theory it has been refined over time (in fact - almost as much time), faced enormous opposition from dominant social forces which forced it to be rigorous.
All the sceptics are supporting the climate change theory right now because sceptics believe only that which has evidence. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence for climate change, no evidence whatsoever for any of the ideas the deniers have proposed - sceptics are with the evidence. The other lot are deniers.
The definition of a denier is one who insists on his position REGARDLESS of the evidence.
There is no difference between a climate denier and a creationist - indeed this is why they correlate so strongly. The vast majority of people who are one are also the other. That correlation has only gotten stronger over time too. In 2008 56% of republicans denied climate change. Today it's a mere 28% - these are people who share your political theories and the concerns that climate change proposals raise for people who believe those political theories - yet have ultimately yielded to the overwhelming evidence. That remaining 28% are made up almost entirely of the batshit insane religious right and a few basement dwelling Randians like you who think that believing something unpopular makes them smart because they think they are so special.
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Com on, I'm doing research in belief revision theory, epistemic logic and social choice. Not every science is empirical. Surely there's a lot of crap in the human sciences, but there is also some good and serious science. Admittedly, much of the better research could be considered applied mathematics but, then again, the same could also be said about many fields in the natural sciences.
I am in science. Its Broken alright. Only a non scientist would say otherwise.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
This article has some more details on the specific error modes. The examples given in physics involve processing collider result data. When the researchers knew what they were looking for they found it reproducibly. When they didn't have any preconceived notions it was discovered that it was a false positive. Some of these biomed and psych studies were the basis of policy and went un reproduced for years. This is a real problem, we should look for solutions.
http://www.economist.com/news/...
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Mann, I think he honestly believes his stuff, but is on some kind of a Narcissistic-Messianic complex; so you can't really blame him for being who he is. Hansen, man oh man you have to give him props for turning off the Air Conditioners during congressional testimony on global warming, definitely an A+ for theatrics and he's been arrested at environmental protests, I'd have fired him, but I respect him.
Gleick, chairing an ethics committee while committing pretexting, copyright infringement and possibly forgery!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Examine your belief that it is possible to do good science in sociology and how long it takes to match reality.
How would you squeeze the perception bias out of that? Then again, so long as you select beliefs to revise carefully, you should get tenure. Just don't even consider trying to revise the beliefs of the department chair.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Science is wrong way more often that it is right! This is not actually a problem. It is part of the scientific method.
Science is about observing. Creating a "hypothesis." Testing the hypothesis. Changing the hypothesis based on observations and tests. Until a hyptothesis can't be proven wrong, in which case it becomes a "theory." If a hypothesis can be 100% proven with no possible chance of altering, it becomes a law.
There are very few laws. For example, the law of gravity, even if we only have theories on how gravity works, gravity is itself a law.
So with gravity, a hypothesis was proposed that every item, despite the size and weight appear to drop at the same speed. Many tests made this a hypothesis. Then someone drops a feather, and based on observing the feather falling more slowly, the theory is called into question. Test are done. The theory is no longer in question because someone observes air and found evidence that while gravity acts on objects at the same rate, air doesn't. Add in the variable air and the theory of gravity still stands. We have the law of gravity.
However, there are many theories where when the theory is called into question, it is flat out proven wrong.
So for any given law there are multiple (mt) of theories. For any given theory theory their are multiple (mh) hypotheses.
So for every law that science comes up with, there are many incorrect scientific assumptions (isa).
Number of times science is wrong is vastly more than the number of times science is right,
Because something is the "currently accepted theory" doesn't mean it is correct. People often say things like, you are an idiot if you don't believe in the "Theory of Foo." However, the fact that the "Theory of Foo" is still a theory means that isn't proven yet. As a proper scientist, we continue to question everything until it is proven to such an extent that it becomes a law.
However doubting a theory because we don't have 100% evidence is different than doubting a theory because it doesn't jive with some religious belief. There are too many variable for either science or religion to make blatant, "your wrong, I'm right" statements. When either side does so, they look foolish.
I find it interesting that the scientific method is pretty much the same method as faith.
Faith = Believe something, act on it, if it is true, your faith is confirmed.
Scientific method: Hypthosize something. Test it. If your tests support your hypothesis, your theory is confirmed.
Also, sometimes results of scientific experiments don't always mean what one might think they mean. For example, science is trying to recreate the first moment when something moves from a lifeless element to a living thing (even if only a single-celled organism).There are many who say, once man can do this, it will forever disprove the idea of intelligent design. However, as soon as man does this, we also just proved the possibility of intelligent design. We proved man could use its intelligence to design and create life. At that point, all we proved is the necessary steps to create life. Further suppositions such as saying that since man can create life it proves that there is or there is no God are just suppositions are completely not part of the scientific method.
Happy contemplating . . .
Nothing has convinced me it's true. I support the theory with evidence. You may feel that evidence is weaker than I do. You may even be right but considering the opposition has no evidence whatsoever as a sceptic I still stand with climate change and will do so until and unless somebody presents an alternative theory with stronger evidence.
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Now that is tiny impact of bad science. Want major global impact, that affected the majority of the human population and created a generation or two of stupidity, how about lead in fuel as bad science.
Bad science is idiotic lead head performance based science, science where idiots with money only want to pay for science that makes them more money and that insanely enough includes purposefully bad science.
Want good science, then you pay for people to do science and monitor the effort put in and the results are simply what they are, a relatively accurate answer to the question that was asked, the measure is how long it took to answer the question, what ever it was and how much it cost. Important salient point how many other questions were answered along the way and how many other interesting question were asked.
GREED is the most offensive word in the human language and fucks up everything it is associated with. Want a better world get rid of the high priests of greed, the ideological fundamentalist zealots who do far more harm than good in every human endeavour they corrupt and that especially includes science.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
People tend to preform worse when they are being criticized. Good scientists tend to be intelligent and for intelligent people this is even more true so I disagree with that direction.
Because I can see they're not trying.
Give me examples to the contrary.
As to what Horton mentions, I have my own thoughts beyond his blog post. It didn't just now occur to me that we have a problem here. And people have been talking about a growing problem of scientific fraud for sometime. To say that because Horton isn't talking about what I am talking about that I'm somehow not entitled to hold a given opinion or make a given argument is irrational.
This article brought up a subject and I gave my opinion on the subject IN GENERAL.
As to his comment not being about fraud, I disagree. Think he's being politically correct. You find this in any thing that gets political in that you need to talk about things without outright calling someone powerful or influential a liar or a cheat. People tend to get defensive when you do that and that makes them less likely to cooperate.
I think he believes that if he softballs this he might get people that would otherwise clamp down to not obstruct reform.
Ergo, he talks about strengthening all the systems in science that would make fraud harder to get away with... while not calling anyone a fraud.
Do you see?
Now here you might say "well making a mistake is not the same thing as being a fraud"... I agree. And certainly there is some simple sloppiness going on. Being sloppy or incompetent is not the same thing as being a fraud or a cheat. However, there is quite a lot of both going on and much of it is being normalized in the "everyone is doing it so I thought it was okay too" sense. This creates a moral disconnect in that the people doing the action often don't see it as morally wrong. Someone that commits some sort of crime or ethical violation will often be genuinely offended that you accused them such actions even though they did precisely that. And their offense stems from the notion that their actions were not out of the norm for their social set. They don't see themselves as being abnormal. And as such they object to the notion that they're being accused of immorality or unethical behavior.
The funniest example of this was when the Governor of Illinois was literally baffled as to why anyone had a problem with him selling Obama's vacant senate seat for CASH. He literally put the appointment up for the highest bidder. And the money would go to the Governor personally. But he was utterly baffled as to why that was an ethical violation. In his words "I had something valuable and why shouldn't I get something for it?" He literally was just confused as to why it was a problem.
And that is because he exists in a systemically corrupt environment. Compare the number of Chicago politicians that have gone to federal prison against the national average and it is night and day.
Regardless, it is expected of adults like you and me... to read between the lines.
I am not a fool. And I expect you are not a fool either.
Therefore, neither of us literally accept whatever is written down by anyone as being without some subtext that influences the meaning or nature of what is being said. There are implications, inferences, explicit understandings, unwritten rules, etc.
You know that or you are a fool. No offense. I'm just emphasizing the point that you can't be literal especially in issues that are this highly charged.
There are many interests that would be threatened or inconvenienced by reform. So if you actually want reform then you have to do it gently to avoid triggering kneejerk opposition... which is apparently what you're doing from my perspective.
In this, the author likely showed more wisdom than myself. I was honest and spoke to you without pretense. This runs the risk of triggering your sort of response. Regrettable but I hold the belief that it is better to trigger you rather than coddle your biases.
Everyone should be triggered until they can't be triggered anymore. Desensitized and burned out until all that remains is logic and reason. No pretense. No political correctness. No paren
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If that were the case then scientific fraud wouldn't happen... and neither would simple mistakes.
Both happen with some frequency so I'm more than a little dubious as to your position.
I think a lot of the issue is that many papers have become so data heavy that they're very difficult to audit without going through all the data in extreme detail which isn't practical.
And I think to some extent this is intentional. You get some of that from corporations that are sued and respond by giving whomever 500,000 pages of memos. How do you go through that? You can't unless you have a huge team and a huge team isn't going to do that without the promise of a huge payoff.
I can think of several scientific papers of dubious providence that are largely immune to systematic audit on this basis. Whether they are true or not is anyone's guess. No one knows. And I'm seeing MORE papers of this nature over time rather than less.
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As to corporate labs, I'm sorry I made the qualification because you're focusing on it beyond its relevance.
We're talking about scientific fraud. Your comments about the corporate labs is not on topic.
Saying "well they're too focused"... so the fuck what? What does that have to do with fraud? Am I saying "do away with government labs and only have corporate labs"?... Nope.
So kindly shut the fuck up about that because you're embarrassing yourself.
Just forget I said anything about corporate labs at all. No no. Enough. Done. Over.
We're talking about fraud and bullshit science.
Spending 2000 years testing polycarbonate limbs or whatever is not related to either FRAUD or faulty science. Is it a waste of time? Perhaps. But it isn't fraud.
is it fraud?
Answer that question for me... please. Tell me now.
Is it fraud?
Yes or no?
If you say no... and you will because that's a rhetorical question, then you're off fucking topic.
Okay? So... enough.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Continental drift. When Wegener proposed it in 1912 he was laughed at. It was considered a lunatic fringe theory. When it was again proposed with minor changes in the 1960s with the help of computer models it convinced maybe half the scientists at the convention barely becoming consensus. When it's slightly altered successor plate tectonics came along in 1988 it became the absolute dominant theory and static continents went from absolute consensus to the lunatic fringe that moving continents had occupied since the 16th century.
There are plenty of others. Lamarckian inheritance went from common knowledge to discredited theory to partly vindicated as an aspect of evolution (epigenetic inheritance of acquired traits) in about 150 years.
You asked for one I just gave you two. This not unique to climate science. It's how science works.
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"Is CO2 a greenhouse gas ? We've had proof of that since the mid 19th century"
Untrue. It was hypothesized by Arrhenius but then Robert Wood showed that greenhouses do not warm because of the "greenhouse effect"
Errm, do you actually believe what you just wrote there? Do you actually believe they called it "greenhouse effect" not as an analogy, but as an actual attempt at explanation? Are you a true moron who can't think for himself and repeats some silly explanation he heard from some moronic talk radio host? Or just a troll?
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/07/19/the-greenhouse-effect-is-not-t/
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Particle physics has a dogma (e.g, nothing with rest-mass NE 0 can travel at or above the speed of light) that makes a claim of faster-thjan-light neutrinos a claim that requires extraordinary proof, so any claim to have discovered faster-than-light neutrinos results in immediate scrutiny. Biomedicine and social science have much looser dogma, dogma that is often very much polluted by people whose world views are often much more driven by wishful thinking (unicorns for EVERYONE!), than by tested science. So I agree with the posters who claim that the problem is not throughout science, being more a problem at the left end of the scientific spectrum (a spectrum described XKCD).
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Because I can see they're not trying.
Give me examples to the contrary.
Did you read the last sentence of my post? The mere existence of research integrity departments indicates *someone* is trying. In any case, you are the one claiming fraud/unethical behavior is the root cause of the problem. It is up to you to support that claim.
To say that because Horton isn't talking about what I am talking about that I'm somehow not entitled to hold a given opinion or make a given argument is irrational.
Who said you weren't entitled to your opinion? Not me. I'm merely stating that your opinion carries little weight because you fail to support it with anything beyond "take my word for it".
As to his comment not being about fraud, I disagree. Think he's being politically correct.
Perhaps, but anyone publicly denying his words better have *something* to back it up. The fact is, you are not merely putting words in his mouth, you are elevating your inserted words *over* what the man actually said.
Do you see?
What I see is a lot of talk..
You know that or you are a fool.
Just because I don't subscribe to your OPINIONS doesn't make me a fool. Back up your claims and I will consider changing my mind.
But I suspect you're going to remain hostile, closed minded, and dismissive. If your conduct remains in that vein, I'll just take you less seriously.
If you think that challenging your unsupported claims qualifies as hostility, you should probably stay off the internet. If you want to open my mind, support your claims with something stronger than "because I said so".
Having any integrity system does not mean they're attempting to draw out frauds and destroy them.
First off, my suggestion is different in nature.
Second, it is different in intent.
I don't want to issue slaps on wrists for this stuff. I want it to be something that is scary enough that the scientists that remain take it very very seriously.
As to unqualified opinions... please cite what you'd like qualified. Keep in mind, I do not believe I am under any obligation to prove what the author was thinking. That is not central to my position. I need only point out that his position is ambiguous given the charged nature of issue and therefore the mere supposition of his actual intent can be used to justify expanding on that.
Beyond that I'm not sure what you're talking about with unqualified opinions... possibly you think I need to prove that the scientific community takes academic fraud seriously? I'm sure there are some people that do, but given the prevalence of it, whatever steps are taken are not sufficient. Thus the screws need to be tightened.
Are my specific solutions the correct ones? No. I believe in trying things and evaluating their effectiveness empirically. I would only stand behind a given solution once it had been proven through experimentation to be effective.
So... you think I have a problem with being challenged? Not at all. I revel in it. I am quite seasoned in such things. Keep that in mind... I am not a push over. ;)
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Having any integrity system does not mean they're attempting to draw out frauds and destroy them.
You've got to be kidding. Part of what research integrity departments do is prevent/expose fraud. RI departments are ubiquitous in academia, and plenty of effort is being expended policing research. Claiming no one is trying is simply not supported by the facts.
As to unqualified opinions... please cite what you'd like qualified
I believe I've been pretty clear. If you're going to assert that science is rife with fraud and unethical behavior - a claim that isn't supported by anything in the source articles - you should back up your assertion with something more substantial than "because I say so". Otherwise, your argument carries little weight.
Is the cause of the problem.
Not to mention basic greed.
People who knowingly commit fraud love how the general public is so naive and gullible about the integrity of scientists.
My position is that fraud is not ubiquitous due to the checks and balances you appear to have failed to notice (otherwise you wouldn't be pushing such a radical view). Thus your cloak and dagger fantasy would be better used in a situation where it is easier to fake things, such as in finance.
There's a very wide void between the few frauds that are difficult to discover and a situation where your odd espionage ideas would make a difference if they worked at all. Your second point for instance makes zero sense since peer reviewed papers are "audited" with more rigor than you suggest as a matter of course. The first is a nice movie plot but isn't going to work in reality - people cite stuff they read whether their own research is any good or not, so your stuff that doesn't exist is never going to pop up in the "barium meal test", ever. Fraudsters are going to cite the most solid stuff they can find to try to appear legit.
With respect, while you may be for instance a master fisherman this is like attempting to use fishing equipment for mountain climbing - doesn't matter how good you are at using it, it's the wrong tool for the job and there not really a problem since there is a chairlift to the top anyway. You are trying to solve a non-problem with tools that are not as good as are already in use.
As to where my system would work... it only finds people that commit fraud.
Your argument is essentially that science doesn't have a problem with fraud period... and that the existing system is working just fine.
This runs contrary to what anyone paying attention would notice on an almost daily basis.
The worst of the rot is in the pseudo sciences that are increasingly passing themselves off as hard sciences.
Psychology for example is mostly conjecture. The actual substance of it is quite thin. But psychology is often represented as being as scientific as physics or even mathematics. Its not. And it is hardly the only pseudo science passing itself off as a real science these days.
That is the first thing that needs to be reigned in firmly.
The other big issue is that there is a lot of science that is very hard to audit by the nature of the evidence being used. Sometimes there are really large data sets or it is really obscure so there aren't a lot of people that could be considered "peers" in the science.
One of the things that is increasingly unacceptable are undisclosed datasets. Someone will do something and filter the data and then present their paper. Auditing the findings sometimes requires that an independent team goes out, collects the same data in the same way, possibly over years, and then goes through whatever the methodology was for achieving the result.
Who does that? It very rarely happens.
Other examples are when the machine being used to determine the finding is very expensive. If you're using one of those particle accelerators you're not going to be repeating people's work that much because it is expensive and the priority is on NEW discoveries not confirming old results.
In some cases this leads to a circle jerk of LITERALLY ten scientists just peer reviewing each other. There are some journals that basically ask a specific scientist to recommend other scientists to review for them. And if that scientist is biased, then he's only going to recommend scientists in his inner circle. And before you know it the whole thing becomes an exercise in confirmation bias.
That has to be dealt with.
Then you have issues these check and balance systems getting overwhelmed by too many papers. These systems were designed at a time when there were a LOT fewer people getting doctorates. And as a result they have not scaled well. These systems need to be scrapped and redesigned with new design objectives in mind.
Look, I don't know why you're worried about my "cloak and dagger" system. It will only catch fraudsters. What is your worry? That it will waste money? These cloak and dagger systems are EXTREMELY cheap to administer because they work like fishing. You put some bait out there and then you see who bites.
You don't have to scan through everything but just whomever bites YOUR bait. Its very easy. Anyone that discovers one of your bogus sources is false is taught to not tell their peers but keep it secret so that someone else that comes along and doesn't do due diligence will get caught. You need to have systems set up that will PASSIVELY screen out bad or lazy scientists.
Scientists have to be kept in a state where they don't trust citations just because they're in the literature. They have to think "okay, that is what it SAYS but is that actually valid?"
That is how you stop cargo cult science.
Because the difference between running an airport and a cargo cult... is that airplanes land at the airport. That is the difference.
That fact.
Period.
One works.
One does not.
Period.
So you validate on that basis and those that are wearing coconuts on their ears and waiting for bamboo airplanes to land get kicked to the curb and those that are doing actual science retain their status as scientists.
It is that or you have what we have now... where good scientists are having a hard time sustaining their credibility and have to work extra hard to prove that what they're saying is true. Because people that claim to be scientists are dragging their names through the mud by being shit at their jobs.
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No it is not.
You are being very simplistic and also getting things backwards. It's not a case of either close to 100% fraud or 0% fraud. Reality bites when people try to prove physical things that are not real so fraud in most sciences cannot be sustained for long since when experiments are repeated reality asserts itself.
I'm not worried, it's just a demonstration of something in one field that makes zero sense in another. Copying other people's work is not the problem and that's the only situation where your suggestion is going to work.
Sorry, you've been very poorly informed or are just guessing. Peer review is why it takes time to publish. Peer review is why it takes so long to submit a thesis.
Only when there are idiots intent on discrediting entire fields of science for political purposes.
How do you reconcile your statement with the pages cited by the summary?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I'll apologise after you apologise for your very insulting initial post. I've been very polite to you considering what you have written.
You've added a very large pile of ignorant bullshit yourself that cannot be attributed to that person or the Lancet. Show me where it says ANYTHING that is in your initial or following posts.
Continental drift. When Wegener proposed it in 1912 he was laughed at.
Funny you mention the example where a climatologist revolutionized geology, the reason why so many geologists want to do the same with climatology.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Very funny considering your attacks on me above which are the real thing and not the imaginary adhom you are pretending I've been hitting you with.
Something else you've made up - I'm an engineer but I have done research work and I currently work with scientists.
So tell me, why is it I have to be an expert to express an opinion but you don't have to even have a high school level understanding of science to do so?
Wow. So you don't know what ad hominem means?
This is getting sadder and sadder.
Okay, I'm 99 percent positive you lied when you said you were involved in scientific peer review. I don't think anyone with that much education could be this ignorant.
Okay, so to explain how ad hominem works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, means responding to arguments by attacking a person's character, rather than to the content of their arguments.""
So the key point here is not whether or not someone insults you but whether the insult itself is the argument used against someone... that is sans any other rational or evidence.
I have not done that to you. My insults are either the conclusions of larger argument. That is I say "because of X variables I conclude you are Y"... that isn't ad hominem. Or the insult isn't even relevant to my argument. Such as saying that the thermometer says the temperature is something other than what you said, therefore it isn't the temperature you said... and by the way you're an idiot. That isn't ad hominem either. The argument was based on the thermometer reading not your idiocy.
Your error is quite common from uneducated people... often high school students. So I'm hoping you're young and not just destined to be ignorant for the rest of your life. Truly. That would be sad.
As to why you have to be an expert to express an opinion? So now you're just descending into hypocrisy? YOU WERE THE ONE THAT STARTED TITLE DROPPING. Not me. Did I ever tell you my qualifications or pretend that I was privy to insider knowledge? Nope.
That was you.
And when I call bullshit on your claims, you respond with "and who says I need to have this special insider knowledge!?"...
Well, you did...
You've made so many fucking mistakes that its hard for me to keep track of them all.
You didn't read the original article or the supporting material which included an ACTUAL expert in peer review... the editor of the Lancet... basically backing up what I was saying.
You made a lot of specious claims about peer review being fine despite there being lots of evidence of being unreliable.
You made laughable claims of having insider knowledge.
You attempted to use "ad verecundiam" against me. Look it up.
Then you tried ad hominem saying that the only reason I would want improved standards in peer review is because I am against global warming research.
Side note, you didn't realize you just admitted that there might be a specific problem with the peer review process in climate change. If there weren't it wouldn't be specifically susceptible to the consequences of reform.
Then when I called bullshit on your credentials, you said "who says I need to have insider knowledge!?"... Well, you did. You tried to use your claims of insider knowledge to sustain ad verecundiam. I didn't do that. You did.
And then you outed yourself as not knowing either how ad hominem works or even what a logical fallacy is in the first place. This further undermines your claims to insider knowledge.
Let me explain fallacies for you as well because really it is the only thing you need to know on the issue. All specific fallacies are derived from this little nugget of wisdom:
Any line of logic that does not prove that some variable has a specific outcome 100 percent of the time is fallacious.
For example, if I said "tom isn't hungry so tom must have had a sandwich"... you don't why tom isn't hungry. You can't conclude that because he isn't that he must have had a sandwich. He could be sick, he could have eaten a fucking burrito. It isn't enough information.
Science is all about the attempt to make non-fallacious arguments. You say "well, this drug cures this disease because we did a test with 2000 people. Some were given our drug, some were given a placebo, and some were given nothing. Those that were given our drug improved. Everyone else died."
That's what you're trying to do. Make non-fallacious arguments.
Now... pay me.
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Of course I do. Now why write a vast and long stream of shit when your first petty little insult ensures that the rest is not going to be read?
First, acknowledge that the editor of the Lancet backed up my position.
I'm putting that statement before anything else because you're using your FEELINGS to justify not reading things. Again, comical that you call yourself some kind of scientist or engineer when you believe your emotional reactions to things is justification to not have intellectual integrity.
So there you go. No more dodging, shithead. I quoted the article to you multiple times and you've been evading and changing the subject ever since. Face it.
You think my feelings made me want to read anything you said? You fucking disgust me. Talking to you is like taking a bite out of rotten fruit. I don't enjoy it. But I respond because the only way to deal with people coming into communities and speciously claiming to be experts while spreading misinformation is to deal with them.
You're a fucking cancer. And THAT is why I'm dealing with you. Not because of my "feelings". People like you are literally destroying Western civilization. You're narcissistic ideologically driven bullshit corrupts everything it touches. The very idea that you would think your feelings even began to fucking matter is baffling to me.
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Your position of "cargo cult science"? Sorry but that is an outright LIE as you are very well aware. The editor of the Lancet said no such thing and sisn't back up any of your other points either - as you are very well aware.
What is the point of all these lies and attacks? Be honest. It will be a refreshing change.
By building the future instead of some stagnant swamp? What exactly are you doing for "Western civilization"? You demanded to know what I do - your turn. Are you in advertising? Political intern for radical politics? Or just a shit stirrer that is angry that other people get more attention?
First, I'd like to point out that you ignored the bit where the editor of the Lancet backed up my position. I challenged you to acknowledge that and you just ignored it.
I put it at the top of my post so you couldn't pretend you didn't read it.
So, your evasion on that point is completely confirmed and that destroys whatever intellectual integrity you might otherwise claim. You're now officially and verifiability a scumbag. I win.
Now that you have no intellectual integrity, lets go through the rest of your post. :D
So you say that you're trying to build a future based on deciet, poor research practices, and political bias? Because your lack of intellectual integrity makes it clear what you're all about.
The stagnant swamp I'm promoting is "STANDARDS", "INTEGRITY", "HONESTY", "IMPARTIALITY"... you know... little things that are utterly required to actually conduct any kind of real science.
Since you neither believe in any of that nor especially understand why any of it is important, you're incapable of doing more than grunt work for any new future. Everything you do will have to be checked and rechecked by people more honest and wise than yourself. Your contributions are dubious at best unless you're kept to fields of study or application that are so simple or have no outlet for your many biases.
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I didn't ignore it, I called you an outright LAIR because the editor of the Lancet does NOT support what you have written. An appeal to authority has to be something from the authority and not just words that you pretend came from them.
Okay, lets go through his post bit by bit so it is extra clear to you.
""âoeA lot of what is published is incorrect.â Iâ(TM)m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in âoepurdahââ"a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the governmentâ(TM)s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposiumâ"on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last weekâ"touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.""
That is the editor of the lancet accusing the scientific establishment of covering up flaws in the peer review process for political reasons. He's saying there is a conspiracy to deceive the public.
He starts with saying someone said "a lot of what is published is incorrect"... and by published we mean what was peer reviewed and published. He is also saying he isn't allowed to tell you who said that. He then says that they're not allowed to take recordings of the event out of the event... for political reasons. He says the government has specifically told the scientists to not quote them when they make statements or give orders to them on this matter. The entire thing is kept secret.
Is that not what he's saying?
And that is the first paragraph which I'm guessing you didn't read.
But it goes on:
""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. As one participant put it, âoepoor methods get resultsâ. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into
these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fi t their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of âoesignificanceâ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.""
First he says that a significant portion of what is published is untrue. The reasons for which are that studies often have sample sizes that render them unreliable, they are studying a tiny variation in variables that cannot be accurately attributed to anything, they start with inital premises that go unquestioned, the people conducting the studies sometimes are being paid, coerced, or profit in some manner by specific findings, and finally that certain conclusions are "fashionable" and so they are concluded at the expense of actual science.
You didn't read any of that. Because that's pretty much all
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And as I proved in this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
""
Okay, lets go through his post bit by bit so it is extra clear to you.
""ÃoeA lot of what is published is incorrect.Ã IÃ(TM)m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in ÃoepurdahÃÃ"a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the governmentÃ(TM)s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposiumÃ"on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last weekÃ"touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.""
That is the editor of the lancet accusing the scientific establishment of covering up flaws in the peer review process for political reasons. He's saying there is a conspiracy to deceive the public.
He starts with saying someone said "a lot of what is published is incorrect"... and by published we mean what was peer reviewed and published. He is also saying he isn't allowed to tell you who said that. He then says that they're not allowed to take recordings of the event out of the event... for political reasons. He says the government has specifically told the scientists to not quote them when they make statements or give orders to them on this matter. The entire thing is kept secret.
Is that not what he's saying?
And that is the first paragraph which I'm guessing you didn't read.
But it goes on:
""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. As one participant put it, Ãoepoor methods get resultsÃ. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into
these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fi t their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of Ãoesignificanceà pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.""
First he says that a significant portion of what is published is untrue. The reasons for which are that studies often have sample sizes that render them unreliable, they are studying a tiny variation in variables that cannot be accurately attributed to anything, they start with inital premises that go unquestioned, the people conducting the studies sometimes are being paid, coerced, or profit in some manner by specific findings, and finally that certain co
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Sorry kid - that doesn't remotely come close to justify the shower of shit you've been pouring on this page of taking an outlier and pretending everything is like that.
Don't give up the day job.
IT DOES NOT
Take responsibility for your own excrement instead of blaming it on somebody else.
See above - and if I'm junior then dementia must be your excuse for your torrent of shit. What manner of creature are you? Are you some sort of cultist, a political intern, an advertising intern or a student at a bible college? How did you get to the point you are at with so much hate of entire professions but so little understanding of the world you live in? What creates an angry young man like yourself.
If you are over 19 - shame on you! Grow up!
I don't have hatred for scientists at all. I deeply respect the profession.
If one dislikes quack doctors that kill their patients and one says that bad doctors should be removed from the profession... does one hate all doctors?
I'm not the one that keeps saying all scientists are bad. That's just you desperately trying to breath life into your dead and rotting credibility by trying to retcon the argument with more strawmen.
As I said before... I know you know you're a fraud.
And now you know that I know that you know you're a fraud as well. ;)
Sleep tight sweetie, if you stay off the internet the bad man can't hurt your wuddle feelings.
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Oh really? Your first post and the petty little spy tricks posts prove otherwise. You are clearly full of hate and venom as many examples above show.