Category: Peer review
At the Guardian: The “widespread notion that academia is morally superior is ridiculous”
| September 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Ethics, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science, Science, worldview issues/foundations and society |
A former biochemist and now medical writer, he has tried both the academy and industry: For the last 18 months or so I’ve been working very closely with people with different roles (medical affairs, marketing, access, etc.) of one particular company. We’ve been preparing for the launch of a new indication for their product, following a […]
Why do we think “social psychology” is science anyway?
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Psychology, Science |
More clutter building up in the inbox about the unreproducible results from social sciences: From ScienceDaily: Today, in Nature Human Behavior, a collaborative team of five laboratories published the results of 21 high-powered replications of social science experiments originally published in Science and Nature, two of the most prestigious journals in science. They failed to replicate […]
Silenced! Selectivity too close to truth?
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by DLH under academic freedom, Culture, Education, Free Speech, Human evolution, Mathematics, Natural selection, Peer review, Popular culture, Probability, Science, Mathematics, Philosophy and (Natural) Theology, Society |
Should science pursue truth regardless of consequences? Or must we succumb to political correctness? Must selectivity of females always equal males? Consider: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole – by Theodore P. Hill “In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are […]
Mortarboard mob “disappears” respected mathematician
| September 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Science |
He and Gunter Bechly should talk. Recently, Barry Arrington noted the story out of Brown University, where a paper got “disappeared” for making the point — that would seem so obvious to anyone who spends much time with teen girls as to hardly merit a paper — that sexual attitudes can be contagious. Ted Hill […]
Enough of treating scientists like gods!
| September 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Peer review, Psychology |
That’s a big part of the problem with peer review and replication failures. Don’t believe me? Get this: In response to massive failures in so-called social sciences: “The findings reinforce the roles that two inherent intuitions play in scientific decision-making: our drive to create a coherent narrative from new data regardless of its quality or […]
Kirk Durston: Backing up the particle physicist who says there is “baked in” bias in science
| September 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review |
Story re Sabine Hosenfelder’s comments here. In response, Kirk Durston from P2C kindly writes to say, If anyone is interested in a list of references with links, backing up the serious problem that science is facing right now, I wrote a blog post a while back that has a “Further Reading” section at the bottom of it. It currently […]
At Nature: No more excuses for non-reproducible methods
| September 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Modern technology means there is no good reason to have the problem, says a professional protocols developer: News last month brought a powerful reminder that access to detailed methods can be essential for getting experiments to work. In 2013, the US$1.6-million Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology set out to repeat key experiments from 50 high-profile cancer […]
A novel suggestion at Nature: Publish the peer reviews
| September 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Philosophy, Science |
But can the internet handle all the spite and unseemliness? Another risk is the ‘weaponization’ of reviewer reports. Opponents of certain types of research (for example, on genetically modified organisms, climate change and vaccines) could take critical remarks in peer reviews out of context or mischaracterize disagreements to undermine public trust in the paper, the […]
Why, in many cases, you’d be a fool to “trust science”
| September 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Psychology, Science |
If you also think that data is a source of information, that is. And have to live in the real world. … a survey of 479 sociology professors found that only 4 per cent identified as conservative or libertarian, while 83 per cent identified as liberal or left-radical. In another survey — of psychologists this […]
Whistling cheerfully while science burns
| August 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Here’s an entirely too self-satisfied item from The Conversation that, hard on the heels of another well-earned jab at “nutrition science,” captures one of the things that is wrong with science today: unearned self-satisfaction. Molecular biologist Merlin Crossly tells us that we should trust name journals, peer review, and impact factors. Are we to believe […]
Another well-earned jab at “nutrition science”
| August 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Alex Berezow sticks another fork in nutrition science, courtesy John Ioannidis: Dr. Ioannidis has gone on to show that the best scientists don’t always get funded, why neuroscience is unreliable, why most clinical research is useless, and that most economics studies are exaggerated. In other words, the process by which we acquire new knowledge is […]
How Unpaywall is opening up science
| August 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
In 2011, “de-roomed” computer scientists developed a way to open up access to journal papers: After being kicked out of a hotel conference room where they had participated in a three-day open-science workshop and hackathon, a group of computer scientists simply moved to an adjacent hallway. There, Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem and Cristhian Parra worked […]
Can retracting bad papers actually hinder science reform?
| August 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review |
That seems counterintuitive, but consider: Retractions can be a way of sweeping misconduct under the rug, when a thorough investigation is really what is needed. The retracted paper is co-authored by researchers who used to collaborate with Yoshihiro Sato, a now-deceased bone researcher who has accrued dozens of retractions. But investigation tends to stop with […]
The Atlantic: “Nastiest feud in science” erupts over dinosaur extinction theory
| August 11, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design, Peer review |
Paleontologist Gerta Keller attributes the extinction 66 million years ago of three-quarters of Earth’s species, including all dinosaurs, not to an asteroid hit but to a series of volcanic eruptions. A writer goes with her on a field trip: The prestige of science is solidly behind the asteroid: The impact theory provided an elegant solution […]
At the New York Times: Defending the failures of social science as “science”
| August 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Peer review, Psychology, Science |
Even while prominent people in that field are coming to terms with the problem. From a New York Times science writer: It is one thing to frisk the studies appearing almost daily in journals that form the current back-and-forth of behavior research. It is somewhat different to call out experiments that became classics — and […]
Replication failures of Darwinian sexual selection openly discussed at The Scientist
| August 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
It’s as if evolutionary biologists are beginning to take some of the problems of Darwinism seriously enough to discuss them openly, as failures in research. In this case, the failure of claims for sexual selection (females drive evolution by choosing the fittest mates) are openly publicized. In the past five years, meta-analyses and reviews have […]
Replication crisis: New proposal suggests, Let scientists admit mistakes and move on
| July 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review |
From Dalmeet Singh Chawla at Undark: N SEPTEMBER 2016, the psychologist Dana Carney came forward with a confession: She no longer believed the findings of a high-profile study she co-authored in 2010 to be true. The study was about “power-posing” — a theory suggesting that powerful stances can psychologically and physiologically help one when under […]
CDC retracts claims about high farmer suicide rate
| July 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Peer review |
While we are talking about retractions, from Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki at the New Food Economy: On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that a widely cited result on farmer suicides was wrong. Over the past several months, numerous writers and reporters have relied on the finding, originally from […]
Seeing is believing? 35,000 science papers may have doctored images
| July 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review |
From Alison McCook at Retraction Watch: n a new preprint posted to bioRxiv, image sleuths scanned hundreds of papers published over a seven-year period in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB), published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The researchers — Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University, Elisabeth Bik of uBiome, Ferric Fang of the […]
From RealClearScience: No, we can’t trust government data on diet and nutrition
| June 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
In a world where some researchers earnestly study the question of why so many people don’t ”trust science,” we learn from Michael Marlow & Edward Archer at RealClearScience: In contrast [to confidence in politicians], public confidence in the ‘scientific community’ runs at 40% and has remained stable since the 1970s. This trust, however, turns out […]
