Where they looking for all his email or all his email mentioning his research? I was under the impression it was only all concerning the research paid for by the government and not the the email tech support for his toaster oven.
They demanded all his email. The expressed reason was to fish through them for any evidence of fraud.
One thing you're missing is the condition of the data. Unfortunately, it's not very good, especially temperature data.
And one thing you're missing is that there are multiple sources of data from independent methods of measurement, with data analysis being done by multiple independent groups around the globe. This is not simply one single data set that is ambiguous; there is everything from balloon measurements to satellite infrared, and even gravity measurements of the thickness of polar ice taken by satellites.
Most notably, there is the Berkeley independent reanalysis of temperature data ("Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature"), which was done explicitly to try to address the claims of bias in the data: http://berkeleyearth.org/ . This is the work of which climate skeptic Anthony Watts said--before the results were released-- "I will believe this study", and which, as it turns out, shows results that pretty much lie exactly on top of the graph produced from the NOAA data, the NASA data, and even the CRU data. (see the comparison here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15373071 )
There are gaps, there are insturmentation issues, there are siting issues
All of which are addressed.
, and, the 800lb gorilla in the room, there's just the simple fact that climate changes happen in geologic time frames, and we literally don't have any direct measurements of that scale.
And that is an "800lb gorilla" for what reason, exactly? The question is about the effect of human-generated carbon dioxide over time scales of decades-- questions about the temperature record over time scales of millions to billions of years ("geologic time frames") is of great scientific interest, but not really relevant to criticizing the record over time scales five to eight orders of magnitude shorter.
So we must proxy, and normalize, and adjust, and model. Really, I don't think anyone can definitively prove anything one way or the other yet.
Sorry, but this is what science does: take data, analyze it, and compare it to models. Science is remarkably good at this.
Another thing science is remarkably good at is comparing two different models and determining which one works. The problem is, there isn't a credible model that doesn't show global warming. The deniers don't have any models. (Haven't you ever wondered how come the results from climate modelling are often critiqued, but the critics never show their own models? That's because they don't have any.) There have been many attempts to find a model with negative feedback loops that cancel out the greenhouse effect, but none of these have ever worked even at the top level.
The "denier" claims aren't falsifiable, because there isn't actually any model to falsify. Their entire model consists of "you're wrong".
The saying is "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof." For a claim that the laws of physics are exactly the same for human generated carbon dioxide as for carbon dioxide measured in a laboratory, measurements used to understand the surface temperature of all of the planets with atmospheres in the solar system (as well as one moon), and supporting atmospheric science that has been known since the late 1800s, what kind of proof might you demand? Perhaps you'd want detailed numerical models to match with the back of the envelope calculations, and you'd want to ask nineteen different groups on four continents to make different computer models; you'd want temperature measurements taken from a variety of different methods-- say, ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite-- to all agree; you'd want satellite measurements of infrared; you'd want vertical temperature profiles...
Well, ok. We've got all that. But it turns out that, if someone has a profit motive to deny the facts, or a political agenda funded by the people with a profit motive to deny the facts, no possible amount of data can change their mind.
What's that other saying? Oh, yes: "It's hard to get a man to understand something when he is being paid to not understand..... "
The h-index of a scientist is the largest number h, such that he/she has at least h papers each of which have received h or more papers. [nb. excluding self-citations].
And that definition shows that the results of this paper are in fact so trivial as to be meaningless.
h-index is cumulative. Their results were "Five factors contributed most to a researcher’s future h-index: their total number of published articles to date, the number of years since their first article was published, the total number of distinct journals in which they had published, the number of articles they had published in “prestigious” journals (such as Science and Nature), and their current h-index."
Are any of these factors even slightly surprising? h-index is about citations. They discover that, wow, the more articles scientists have in more journals, and more widely read journals, the greater the number of times they get cited. That's not news.
They continue "Not surprisingly, the best indicator of a scientist's h-index one year in the future was their current h-index."
"Not surprisingly" is rather an understatement, since the h-index one year in the future is their current h-index, plus a small change for the citations they get this year. It's like saying the best predictor of your bank account next year is your bank account this year (except bank accounts can go down).
It would have been slightly less trivial to predict the change in h-index. But even there, it's prettyobviously the same factors.
Trivial mod but practically impossible to implement - that's the whole beauty of it.
Hard to implement? Why in the world do you think so? It's sweet that you think that it's impossible for there to be any invisible tracking, but even if there isn't-- Every transaction is public! Good grief, I can't think of anything more succeptible to decoding via data mining techniques than which transaction goes to whom. Unless you generate a new address for every single transaction, sooner or later there's enough information to decode who any given address tracks back to. And if you do generate a new address for each transaction, that doesn't necessarily mean you're safe either.
Bitcoin requires computer tracking of every single transaction, and requires distributing the information on each transaction to the public.
At the risk of getting flamed, I don't see how "Bitcoin as a currency and system collide head-on with the law" [requiring tracking of currency transactions]; the bitcoin system would require only trivial mods to do remove the privacy and track the "who" as well as the "what".
My advice: don't incorporate. The added burden of accounting and paperwork way outstrips the minor benefits of incorporation unless maybe you're making over about $50,000 per year.
First, as other mention, it limits liability for damage and creditors taking your personal possessions.
No, it really doesn't. If you're looking for protection against, say, a lawsuit for selling a defective product, then yes; or if you plan on buying parts on credit, and aren't sure you are going to be able to pay, sure, it's good protection. But you'd said you'd be doing consulting work. It's unlikely that you would encounter any lawsuits of a type that incorporation would protect against.
Second, this is about the ONLY way to keep more of your hard earned tax dollars. YOU can begin to write off all expenses, mileage (keep a logbook in your car to write odometer settings, easy documentation).
Nonsense. File a schedule C; that allows you to deduct all those things on your personal taxes.
We doubt AGW because we have been given very solid fact based reasons to.
Let's see: nineteen different institutions on four continents are running global circulation models ("climate models") that show the relationship between human-generated carbon dioxide and temperature. They must all be conspiring to cover up the truth, right? And also to cover up some error in the original 1967 Manabe and Wetherald calculation, the prediction of which fits the data taken over the last fifty years. I know of five different groups doing global temperature measurements, using everything from ship-based measurements to balloons to satellites. They're all in cahoots too, I assume?
Yes, so far I'd say it does look like people-- you-- who reject the findings from climate science tend to also subscribe to conspiracy theories.
We see hacks like Mann protected from the consequences of his fraud with the 'Hockey Stick" and nay, even rewarded for it. Cleared from all wrongdoing by the same corrupt institution that turned a blind eye to Sandusky...
You mean, cleared from all wrongdoing by the eight corrupt institutions. You are aware that there have been eight different investigations of the alleged wrongdoings purportedly revealed by the stolen emails from the CRU at East Anglia, and that all of them said that there was no fraud? So your conspiracy includes the National Science Foundation and the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.
Yep, you're indeed a data point confirming the study: people who reject the findings from climate science subscribe to conspiracy theories.
No. I have looked into the HIV/AIDS thing enough to be willing to bet that if it isn't the entire story it is pretty close to it. But when the banhammer came down in the 1980s on any dissent (the science is settled! Settled I say!) there was still some room for doubt.
This 1980s "ban" on dissent you mention-- you mean the one that allowed him a major article in 1989, "Human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: correlation but not causation" in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences? That "1980s" ban?
Pretty ineffective "ban" I'd say, since he continued publishing his theories well into the 2000s, long long after they were thoroughly discredited. Turns out, the science actually was settled, and, well guess what-- the scientific researchers really did know what they were doing.
Duesberg has the unique distinction among wackos, though, that his rhetoric of "HIV doesn't cause AIDS so go ahead and have sex even if you're HIV positive, it won't hurt anybody (but don't take those antiviral drugs!)" actually did result in killing large numbers of people.
A lack of planet on a nearby star does not mean there is nothing around the star
And, even more to the point, a lack of a planet larger than ten times the Earth's mass in an Earth-like orbit, or two times Earth's mass in a close-in (ten day) orbit says nothing about the presence or absence of Earth- mass planets, unless you have a well-accepted theory showing that systems with Earthlike planets must also have Jupiter-like planets, which is a theory we don't have.
That's according to what the actual article says-- ignore the Slashdot summary, it's wrong. http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2273
And, worse, the mass detection limits are limits on m*sin(i)-- if the orbits are inclined, the planet masses that couldn't be detected would be even larger. (in the limit, if the orbit is face on, it wouldn't have detected planets regardless of how massive they are)
Overall conclusion: This puts limits on planets around Barnard's star, but did not have the ability to detect, and thus did not rule out, Earth-mass planets.
I think this is a case that can be covered by Betteridge's Law of Headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".
In the ideal world, that would be true, but in the real world, what you most often learn is that there are many different ways to screw up a delicate measurement in ways from which you learn little or nothing.
What are you talking about? Negative results doesn't mean someone screwed up a measurement. Negative results means the experiment ran correctly but the results went counter to the hypothesis.
That would be nice if things were that simple.
Negative results are the fruit of good science just as much as positive results are. Screwing up the measurements in an experiment is simply bad science, or not science at all.
What planet are you from? I want to move to your planet, where science is so easy, and stuff always works unless it's "bad science," which apparently comes with a label so anybody can tell which is which.
On my planet, stuff doesn't always work. When it doesn't work, it's not always easy to figure out why it doesn't work. When you don't get a result, it's hard to be confident that you didn't do something wrong-- and the people who are confident that they didn't do something wrong... are often wrong. It's not always trivial to say whether or not you did something wrong, or whether the experiment set up had a flaw, or there was something that turns out to be important that you didn't know was important, or whether the result you're trying to replicate was just wrong to start with.
Yes, the more I look at this, the more I see little chance for it to work.
A graduate student will typically spend ~2 years of dedicated study in a narrowly specialized field to learning enough lab technique to do a difficult experiment, often either building their own custom-made equipment, or using one-of-a-kind equipment hand-built by a previous graduate student, and do so with absurdly low pay, in order to produce new results. You can't just buy that; they're working for peanuts only because they are looking for the credit for an original contribution to the field. And then you're going to say "oh, by the way, the original authors get the publication credit for your work if it reproduces their results, and we won't publish at all if you don't."
And, frankly, why would the original researchers go for this? You're really asking institutions to pay in order to set up a laboratory at a rival institution, and then spend time and effort painstakingly tutoring their rivals in technique so as to bring them up to the cutting edge of research? And even if you can bring a team from zero up to cutting-edge enough to duplicate your work, what you get out of it is a publication in a database saying you were right in the first place?
Negative results are sometimes just as interesting as positive ones. As you usually learn something.
You would think.
In the ideal world, that would be true, but in the real world, what you most often learn is that there are many different ways to screw up a delicate measurement in ways from which you learn little or nothing.
That's always been a problem; the journals usually want to publish new work, and aren't interested in publishing work that just repeats something already done.
I'm puzzled by this sentence, though: "Once the validation studies are complete, the original authors will have the option of publishing the results in PLoS ONE, linked to the original publication. "
They're saying that the people who did the work replicating the experiment don't get the credit for their work, but instead the authors of the paper that they're trying to replicate do?
And, what if the new work doesn't replicate the results? Does it get published? Credited to whom?
Slashdot Mirror
Where they looking for all his email or all his email mentioning his research? I was under the impression it was only all concerning the research paid for by the government and not the the email tech support for his toaster oven.
They demanded all his email. The expressed reason was to fish through them for any evidence of fraud.
One thing you're missing is the condition of the data. Unfortunately, it's not very good, especially temperature data.
And one thing you're missing is that there are multiple sources of data from independent methods of measurement, with data analysis being done by multiple independent groups around the globe. This is not simply one single data set that is ambiguous; there is everything from balloon measurements to satellite infrared, and even gravity measurements of the thickness of polar ice taken by satellites.
Most notably, there is the Berkeley independent reanalysis of temperature data ("Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature"), which was done explicitly to try to address the claims of bias in the data: http://berkeleyearth.org/ . This is the work of which climate skeptic Anthony Watts said--before the results were released-- "I will believe this study", and which, as it turns out, shows results that pretty much lie exactly on top of the graph produced from the NOAA data, the NASA data, and even the CRU data. (see the comparison here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15373071 )
There are gaps, there are insturmentation issues, there are siting issues
All of which are addressed.
, and, the 800lb gorilla in the room, there's just the simple fact that climate changes happen in geologic time frames, and we literally don't have any direct measurements of that scale.
And that is an "800lb gorilla" for what reason, exactly? The question is about the effect of human-generated carbon dioxide over time scales of decades-- questions about the temperature record over time scales of millions to billions of years ("geologic time frames") is of great scientific interest, but not really relevant to criticizing the record over time scales five to eight orders of magnitude shorter.
So we must proxy, and normalize, and adjust, and model. Really, I don't think anyone can definitively prove anything one way or the other yet.
Sorry, but this is what science does: take data, analyze it, and compare it to models. Science is remarkably good at this.
Another thing science is remarkably good at is comparing two different models and determining which one works. The problem is, there isn't a credible model that doesn't show global warming. The deniers don't have any models. (Haven't you ever wondered how come the results from climate modelling are often critiqued, but the critics never show their own models? That's because they don't have any.) There have been many attempts to find a model with negative feedback loops that cancel out the greenhouse effect, but none of these have ever worked even at the top level.
The "denier" claims aren't falsifiable, because there isn't actually any model to falsify. Their entire model consists of "you're wrong".
>
What is that saying about outrageous claims?
The saying is "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof." For a claim that the laws of physics are exactly the same for human generated carbon dioxide as for carbon dioxide measured in a laboratory, measurements used to understand the surface temperature of all of the planets with atmospheres in the solar system (as well as one moon), and supporting atmospheric science that has been known since the late 1800s, what kind of proof might you demand? Perhaps you'd want detailed numerical models to match with the back of the envelope calculations, and you'd want to ask nineteen different groups on four continents to make different computer models; you'd want temperature measurements taken from a variety of different methods-- say, ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite-- to all agree; you'd want satellite measurements of infrared; you'd want vertical temperature profiles...
Well, ok. We've got all that. But it turns out that, if someone has a profit motive to deny the facts, or a political agenda funded by the people with a profit motive to deny the facts, no possible amount of data can change their mind.
What's that other saying? Oh, yes: "It's hard to get a man to understand something when he is being paid to not understand. .... "
The h-index of a scientist is the largest number h, such that he/she has at least h papers each of which have received h or more papers. [nb. excluding self-citations].
And that definition shows that the results of this paper are in fact so trivial as to be meaningless.
h-index is cumulative. Their results were "Five factors contributed most to a researcher’s future h-index: their total number of published articles to date, the number of years since their first article was published, the total number of distinct journals in which they had published, the number of articles they had published in “prestigious” journals (such as Science and Nature), and their current h-index."
Are any of these factors even slightly surprising? h-index is about citations. They discover that, wow, the more articles scientists have in more journals, and more widely read journals, the greater the number of times they get cited. That's not news.
They continue "Not surprisingly, the best indicator of a scientist's h-index one year in the future was their current h-index."
"Not surprisingly" is rather an understatement, since the h-index one year in the future is their current h-index, plus a small change for the citations they get this year. It's like saying the best predictor of your bank account next year is your bank account this year (except bank accounts can go down).
It would have been slightly less trivial to predict the change in h-index. But even there, it's prettyobviously the same factors.
You can't even see Phobos from the polar regions (> 70 degrees or so) -- it's always below the horizon -- so how can it eclipse anything?
OK, good point. You get transits (eclipses) at every place on the surface of Mars from which you can see the moons.
No transits of Phobos from locations where you can't see Phobos.
Every location on Mars gets an eclipse by both Phobos and Deimos twice a year.
It's nice that Curiosity is looking into the sky, but it's worth pointing out that this is by no means the first time we've watched eclipses from the surface of Mars-- we've caught both Phobos and Deimos transiting the sun, from both of the the MER rovers:
Spirit http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~lemmon/mer/phobos_transit_104a.gif
and Opportunity http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~lemmon/mer/Phobos_Sol45B.gif
A nice page from 2006 is here: http://www.bibalex.org/eclipse2006/MarsEclipses.htm
Trivial mod but practically impossible to implement - that's the whole beauty of it.
Hard to implement? Why in the world do you think so? It's sweet that you think that it's impossible for there to be any invisible tracking, but even if there isn't-- Every transaction is public! Good grief, I can't think of anything more succeptible to decoding via data mining techniques than which transaction goes to whom. Unless you generate a new address for every single transaction, sooner or later there's enough information to decode who any given address tracks back to. And if you do generate a new address for each transaction, that doesn't necessarily mean you're safe either.
Bitcoin requires computer tracking of every single transaction, and requires distributing the information on each transaction to the public.
At the risk of getting flamed, I don't see how "Bitcoin as a currency and system collide head-on with the law" [requiring tracking of currency transactions]; the bitcoin system would require only trivial mods to do remove the privacy and track the "who" as well as the "what".
I'm surprised that DARPA is getting all the credit here; the approach isn't new with DARPA.
That approach is known as the "spectrum splitting" approach. Some older work was the NASA "rainbow concentrator" array concept:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20110024141
http://www.techbriefs.com/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=/Briefs/June03/NPO21051.html
In general, spectral-splitting concepts do need to track the sun, and so they're envisioned more for concentrator systems than for flat-plate arrays.
Honestly, if you have enough skills to support yourself through programming, why would you ever get a degree in psychology, especially a Ph.D.?
Possibly because he or she is interested in the subject and wants to do work in the area?
Just a guess.
My advice....incorporate yourself immediately!!
My advice: don't incorporate. The added burden of accounting and paperwork way outstrips the minor benefits of incorporation unless maybe you're making over about $50,000 per year.
First, as other mention, it limits liability for damage and creditors taking your personal possessions.
No, it really doesn't. If you're looking for protection against, say, a lawsuit for selling a defective product, then yes; or if you plan on buying parts on credit, and aren't sure you are going to be able to pay, sure, it's good protection. But you'd said you'd be doing consulting work. It's unlikely that you would encounter any lawsuits of a type that incorporation would protect against.
Second, this is about the ONLY way to keep more of your hard earned tax dollars. YOU can begin to write off all expenses, mileage (keep a logbook in your car to write odometer settings, easy documentation).
Nonsense. File a schedule C; that allows you to deduct all those things on your personal taxes.
" a much stronger effect on their voting behavior..."
The effect quoted is a 0.39% increase in number voting. That's it-- an effect of less than half a percent.
One wonders how bad the "conventional" methods of increasing are, if an effect of 0.39% is "much stronger".
We doubt AGW because we have been given very solid fact based reasons to.
Let's see: nineteen different institutions on four continents are running global circulation models ("climate models") that show the relationship between human-generated carbon dioxide and temperature. They must all be conspiring to cover up the truth, right? And also to cover up some error in the original 1967 Manabe and Wetherald calculation, the prediction of which fits the data taken over the last fifty years. I know of five different groups doing global temperature measurements, using everything from ship-based measurements to balloons to satellites. They're all in cahoots too, I assume?
Yes, so far I'd say it does look like people-- you-- who reject the findings from climate science tend to also subscribe to conspiracy theories.
We see hacks like Mann protected from the consequences of his fraud with the 'Hockey Stick" and nay, even rewarded for it. Cleared from all wrongdoing by the same corrupt institution that turned a blind eye to Sandusky...
You mean, cleared from all wrongdoing by the eight corrupt institutions. You are aware that there have been eight different investigations of the alleged wrongdoings purportedly revealed by the stolen emails from the CRU at East Anglia, and that all of them said that there was no fraud? So your conspiracy includes the National Science Foundation and the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.
Yep, you're indeed a data point confirming the study: people who reject the findings from climate science subscribe to conspiracy theories.
No. I have looked into the HIV/AIDS thing enough to be willing to bet that if it isn't the entire story it is pretty close to it. But when the banhammer came down in the 1980s on any dissent (the science is settled! Settled I say!) there was still some room for doubt.
You mean, the AIDS denier Peter Duesberg? This guy: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/data/cohen/266-5191-1642a.pdf
This 1980s "ban" on dissent you mention-- you mean the one that allowed him a major article in 1989, "Human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: correlation but not causation" in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences? That "1980s" ban?
Pretty ineffective "ban" I'd say, since he continued publishing his theories well into the 2000s, long long after they were thoroughly discredited. Turns out, the science actually was settled, and, well guess what-- the scientific researchers really did know what they were doing.
Duesberg has the unique distinction among wackos, though, that his rhetoric of "HIV doesn't cause AIDS so go ahead and have sex even if you're HIV positive, it won't hurt anybody (but don't take those antiviral drugs!)" actually did result in killing large numbers of people.
Since it didn't actually rove...
Betteridge's Law of Headlines speaks for itself.
A lack of planet on a nearby star does not mean there is nothing around the star
And, even more to the point, a lack of a planet larger than ten times the Earth's mass in an Earth-like orbit, or two times Earth's mass in a close-in (ten day) orbit says nothing about the presence or absence of Earth- mass planets, unless you have a well-accepted theory showing that systems with Earthlike planets must also have Jupiter-like planets, which is a theory we don't have.
That's according to what the actual article says-- ignore the Slashdot summary, it's wrong. http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2273
And, worse, the mass detection limits are limits on m*sin(i)-- if the orbits are inclined, the planet masses that couldn't be detected would be even larger. (in the limit, if the orbit is face on, it wouldn't have detected planets regardless of how massive they are)
Overall conclusion: This puts limits on planets around Barnard's star, but did not have the ability to detect, and thus did not rule out, Earth-mass planets.
How often do you answer and either-or question with a yes or a no?
The question was "Should I Get an eBook Reader Or a Tablet?"
The answer is "no."
I think this is a case that can be covered by Betteridge's Law of Headlines:
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".
In the ideal world, that would be true, but in the real world, what you most often learn is that there are many different ways to screw up a delicate measurement in ways from which you learn little or nothing.
What are you talking about? Negative results doesn't mean someone screwed up a measurement. Negative results means the experiment ran correctly but the results went counter to the hypothesis.
That would be nice if things were that simple.
Negative results are the fruit of good science just as much as positive results are. Screwing up the measurements in an experiment is simply bad science, or not science at all.
What planet are you from? I want to move to your planet, where science is so easy, and stuff always works unless it's "bad science," which apparently comes with a label so anybody can tell which is which.
On my planet, stuff doesn't always work. When it doesn't work, it's not always easy to figure out why it doesn't work. When you don't get a result, it's hard to be confident that you didn't do something wrong-- and the people who are confident that they didn't do something wrong... are often wrong. It's not always trivial to say whether or not you did something wrong, or whether the experiment set up had a flaw, or there was something that turns out to be important that you didn't know was important, or whether the result you're trying to replicate was just wrong to start with.
There are already a multitude of solutions available, eg. bio-friendly bags that turn poop into fertilizer and just need you dig a hole.
And the "multitude of solutions available" don't always work.
Here's a "lessons learned" article on the Daxing Ecological Community toilet experience; hope the Gates foundation is willling to learn from other peoples' failures: http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5068-Eco-toilet-scheme-ends-in-failure
Let's hope he does something better than the Stockholm "green" toilets they tried in Mongolia:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/07/toilet-tuesday-death-worlds-largest-eco-toilet/2783/
http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5068-Eco-toilet-scheme-ends-in-failure
Yes, the more I look at this, the more I see little chance for it to work.
A graduate student will typically spend ~2 years of dedicated study in a narrowly specialized field to learning enough lab technique to do a difficult experiment, often either building their own custom-made equipment, or using one-of-a-kind equipment hand-built by a previous graduate student, and do so with absurdly low pay, in order to produce new results. You can't just buy that; they're working for peanuts only because they are looking for the credit for an original contribution to the field. And then you're going to say "oh, by the way, the original authors get the publication credit for your work if it reproduces their results, and we won't publish at all if you don't."
And, frankly, why would the original researchers go for this? You're really asking institutions to pay in order to set up a laboratory at a rival institution, and then spend time and effort painstakingly tutoring their rivals in technique so as to bring them up to the cutting edge of research? And even if you can bring a team from zero up to cutting-edge enough to duplicate your work, what you get out of it is a publication in a database saying you were right in the first place?
Negative results are sometimes just as interesting as positive ones. As you usually learn something.
You would think.
In the ideal world, that would be true, but in the real world, what you most often learn is that there are many different ways to screw up a delicate measurement in ways from which you learn little or nothing.
That's always been a problem; the journals usually want to publish new work, and aren't interested in publishing work that just repeats something already done.
I'm puzzled by this sentence, though: "Once the validation studies are complete, the original authors will have the option of publishing the results in PLoS ONE, linked to the original publication. "
They're saying that the people who did the work replicating the experiment don't get the credit for their work, but instead the authors of the paper that they're trying to replicate do?
And, what if the new work doesn't replicate the results? Does it get published? Credited to whom?