Junk Science: Poor science, pseudoscience, errors, and fraud

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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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When my wife was pregnant, if someone had painted a cinder block blue and stenciled a yellow "Graco" on one side she would have bought it and put in the baby's room.
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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lots of good absurd rants to be made from that site :)
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

Post by YMix »

Typhoon wrote:Spurious correlations
Everything is so clear now!
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
The Kushner sh*t is greasy - Stevie B.
Simple Minded

Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

Post by Simple Minded »

YMix wrote:
Typhoon wrote:Spurious correlations
Everything is so clear now!
The only valid intellectual response to the old bromide that "Correlation is not causation!" is "Oh Yeah! Prove it!"

That'll shut em up!
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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I wonder what the correlation is between correlation and causation 8-)
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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Dr. Oz and the Pathology of 'Open-Mindedness'
In the pursuit of scientific discovery, where is the line between alternative therapies and "quackademic" medicine?
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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Typhoon wrote:Dr. Oz and the Pathology of 'Open-Mindedness'
In the pursuit of scientific discovery, where is the line between alternative therapies and "quackademic" medicine?
It is a matter of trueauthority vs corrupt authority For example Plate tectonics was considered quackery as late as the 1940's at the college level. But more often many ideas really are quackery. And to know the difference can take years of highly specialized study. People look to the very same clues to prove whether things are quackery or truth. One man's ivory tower to be pulled down is another man's authority. It says more about the people judging than those espousing/promoting.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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Add another prominent journal editor to The Lancet and NEJM.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 96077.html
Scientific peer reviews are a 'sacred cow' ready to be slaughtered, says former editor of BMJ

The peer review process – long considered the gold standard of quality scientific research – is a “sacred cow” that should be slaughtered, the former editor of one of the country’s leading medical journals has said.

Richard Smith, who edited the British Medical Journal for more than a decade, said there was no evidence that peer review was a good method of detecting errors and claimed that “most of what is published in journals is just plain wrong or nonsense”.

Research papers considered for scientific and medical journals undergo a process of scrutiny by experts before they can be published. Hundreds of thousands of new studies are published around the world every year, and the peer review process exists to ensure that readers can have confidence that published findings are scientifically sound.

But Dr Smith said pre-publication peer review was slow, expensive and, perhaps ironically, lacking in evidence that it actually works in its chief goal of spotting errors.

Speaking at a Royal Society event earlier this week, he said an experiment conducted during his time at the BMJ, in which eight deliberate errors were included in a short paper sent to 300 reviewers, had exposed how easily the peer review process could fail.

“No-one found more than five, the median was two, and 20 per cent didn’t spot any,” he was quoted as saying by Times Higher Education. “If peer review was a drug it would never get on the market because we have lots of evidence of its adverse effects and don’t have evidence of its benefit.”

He said the process of peer review before publication could also work against innovative papers, was open to abuse, and should be done away with in favour of “the real peer review” of the wider scientific community post-publication.

“It’s time to slaughter the sacred cow,” he said, while acknowledging that do so would likely be “too bold a step” for a journal editor to take.

Dr Smith, who edited the BMJ between 1991 and 2004, is a longstanding critic of the pre-publication peer review process. In the past he has bemoaned the delays that the process can bring, in some cases of more than two years, between a paper being completed and its final publication.

His comments come at a time of serious soul-searching within the scientific community, over the quality of much published research.

The editor of the second of the country’s two leading medical journals, Dr Richard Horton of The Lancet, wrote in an editorial earlier this month that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue”, blaming, among other things, studies with small sample sizes, researchers’ conflicts of interest and “an obsession” among scientists for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance”.

“The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming,” he wrote. “In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt their data to fit their preferred theory of the world.”

Dr Horton also suggested reform of the peer review process – but to improve it, not scrap it; potentially with the introduction of incentives for scientists who peer review more critically.

Dr Trish Groves, the current head of research at BMJ said that, while peer review wasn’t perfect, it was “still the best way to help research funders, conference organisers, and journal editors decide which studies to support and disseminate and to help readers, the public, patients, and healthcare providers decide what evidence to use in decision making.”
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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Bleach enemas as a so-called cure for autism?

Bleaching away what ails you

Image

How is this not child abuse?
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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buahahaha.

sigh.
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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a quackfest of such unrelenting quackitude that it has to be seen to be believed
:lol:
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
The Kushner sh*t is greasy - Stevie B.
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/scien ... .html?_r=0

“feeling thermometer,”? Really?

Doubts About Study of Gay Canvassers Rattles the Field


By BENEDICT CAREY and PAM BELLUCKMAY 25, 2015

He was a graduate student who seemingly had it all: drive, a big idea and the financial backing to pay for a sprawling study to test it.

In 2012, as same-sex marriage advocates were working to build support in California, Michael LaCour, a political science researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, asked a critical question: Can canvassers with a personal stake in an issue — in this case, gay men and women — actually sway voters’ opinions in a lasting way?

He would need an influential partner to help frame, interpret and place into context his findings — to produce an authoritative scientific answer. And he went to one of the giants in the field, Donald P. Green, a Columbia University professor and co-author of a widely used text on field experiments.

Retraction Sought in Study on Views of Gay MarriageMAY 20, 2015

A new study that used door-to-door canvassing to assess voters' attitudes toward same-sex marriage found that gay canvassers could trigger a persistent change in those attitudes.

Gay Advocates Can Shift Same-Sex Marriage ViewsDEC. 11, 2014


“I thought it was a very ambitious idea, so ambitious that it might not be suitable for a graduate student,” said Dr. Green, who signed on as a co-author of Mr. LaCour’s study in 2013. “But it’s such an important question, and he was very passionate about it.”

Marcia McNutt, editor in chief of Science, said editors there were still grappling with a decision on retracting the study. Credit Drew Angerer for The New York Times

Last week, their finding that gay canvassers were in fact powerfully persuasive with people who had voted against same-sex marriage — published in December in Science, one of the world’s leading scientific journals — collapsed amid accusations that Mr. LaCour had misrepresented his study methods and lacked the evidence to back up his findings.

On Tuesday, Dr. Green asked the journal to retract the study because of Mr. LaCour’s failure to produce his original data. Mr. LaCour declined to be interviewed, but has said in statements that he stands by the findings.

The case has shaken not only the community of political scientists but also public trust in the way the scientific establishment vets new findings. It raises broad questions about the rigor of rules that guide a leading academic’s oversight of a graduate student’s research and of the peer review conducted of that research by Science.

New, previously unreported details have emerged that suggest serious lapses in the supervision of Mr. LaCour’s work. For example, Dr. Green said he had never asked Mr. LaCour to detail who was funding their research, and Mr. LaCour’s lawyer has told Science that Mr. LaCour did not pay participants in the study the fees he had claimed.

Dr. Green, who never saw the raw data on which the study was based, said he had repeatedly asked Mr. LaCour to post the data in a protected databank at the University of Michigan, where they could be examined later if needed. But Mr. LaCour did not.

“It’s a very delicate situation when a senior scholar makes a move to look at a junior scholar’s data set,” Dr. Green said. “This is his career, and if I reach in and grab it, it may seem like I’m boxing him out.”

But Dr. Ivan Oransky, A co-founder of “Retraction Watch,” which first published news of the allegations and Dr. Green’s retraction request, said, “At the end of the day he decided to trust LaCour, which was, in his own words, a mistake.”

Many of the most contentious particulars of how the study was conducted are not yet known, and Mr. LaCour said he would produce a “definitive” accounting by the end of next week. Science has published an expression of concern about the study and is considering retracting it, said Marcia McNutt, editor in chief.

“Given the negative publicity that has now surrounded this paper and the concerns that have been raised about its irreproducibility, I think it would be in Michael LaCour’s best interest to agree to a retraction of the paper as swiftly as possible,” she said in an interview on Friday. “Right now he’s going to have such a black cloud over his head that it’s going to haunt him for the rest of his days.”

Only three months ago he posted on Facebook that he would soon be moving across country for his “dream job” as a professor at Princeton. That future could now be in doubt. A Princeton spokesman, Martin Mbugua, noting that Mr. LaCour was not yet an employee there, said, “We will review all available information and determine the next steps.”
Op-Ed Contributors: What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?MAY 22, 2015

Critics said the intense competition by graduate students to be published in prestigious journals, weak oversight by academic advisers and the rush by journals to publish studies that will attract attention too often led to sloppy and even unethical research methods. The now disputed study was covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

“You don’t get a faculty position at Princeton by publishing something in the Journal Nobody-Ever-Heard-Of,” Dr. Oransky said. Is being lead author on a big study published in Science “enough to get a position in a prestigious university?” he asked, then answered: “They don’t care how well you taught. They don’t care about your peer reviews. They don’t care about your collegiality. They care about how many papers you publish in major journals.”

The details that have emerged about the flaws in the research have prompted heated debate among scientists and policy makers about how to reform the current system of review and publication. This is far from the first such case.

The scientific community’s system for vetting new findings, built on trust, is poorly equipped to detect deliberate misrepresentations. Faculty advisers monitor students’ work, but there are no standard guidelines governing the working relationship between senior and junior co-authors.

The reviewers at journals may raise questions about a study’s methodology or data analysis, but rarely have access to the raw data itself, experts said. They do not have time; they are juggling the demands of their own work, and reviewing is typically unpaid.

In cases like this one — with the authors on opposite sides of the country — that trust allowed Mr. LaCour to work with little supervision.

“It is simply unacceptable for science to continue with people publishing on data they do not share with others,” said Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Journals, funding agencies and universities must begin requiring that data be publicly available.”

Mr. LaCour met Dr. Green at a summer workshop on research methods in Ann Arbor, Mich., that is part education, part pilgrimage for young scientists. Dr. Green is a co-author of the textbook “Field Experiments: Design, Analysis and Interpretation.” He has published more than 100 papers, on topics like campaign finance and party affiliation, and is one of the most respected proponents of rigorous analysis and data transparency in social science

He is also known to offer younger researchers a hand up.

“If it is an interesting question, Don is interested,” said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia who has collaborated with Dr. Green.

Mr. LaCour, whose résumé mentions a stint as the University of Texas Longhorns’ mascot “Hook Em” as well as an impressive list of academic honors, approached Dr. Green after class at the workshop one day with his idea.

His proposal was intriguing. Previous work had found that standard campaign tactics — ads, pamphleteering, conventional canvassing — did not alter core beliefs in a lasting way. Mr. LaCour wanted to test canvassing done by people who would personally be affected by the outcome of the vote.

The Los Angeles LGBT Center sent canvassers into neighborhoods that had voted against same-sex marriage. Mr. LaCour’s job was to track voters’ attitudes over time using a tool called the “feelings thermometer.” Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times

His timing was perfect. The Los Angeles LGBT Center, after losing the fight over Proposition 8, which barred same-sex marriage in California, was doing just this sort of work in conservative parts of the county and wanted to see if it was effective. Dave Fleischer, director of the center’s leadership lab, knew Dr. Green and had told him of the center’s innovative canvassing methods.

“Don said we were in luck because there was a Ph.D. candidate named Mike LaCour who was interested in doing an experiment,” Mr. Fleischer said.

Money seemed ample for the undertaking — and Dr. Green did not ask where exactly it was coming from.

“Michael said he had hundreds of thousands in grant money, and, yes, in retrospect, I could have asked about that,” Dr. Green said. “But it’s a delicate matter to ask another scholar the exact method through which they’re paying for their work.”

Dr. McNutt said that for Dr. Green to be “in a situation where he’s so distant from the student that he would have so little opportunity to really keep tabs on what was happening with him and with this data set — it’s just not a good situation.”

The canvassing was done rigorously, Mr. Fleischer said. The LGBT Center sent people into neighborhoods that had voted against same-sex marriage, including Boyle Heights, South Central and East Los Angeles. The voters were randomly assigned to either gay or straight canvassers, who were trained to engage them respectfully in conversation.

Mr. LaCour’s job was to track those voters’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage multiple times, over nine months, using a survey tool called the “feeling thermometer,” intended to pick up subtle shifts. He reported a response rate of the participants who completed surveys, 12 percent, that was so high that Dr. Green insisted the work be replicated to make sure it held up.

Mr. LaCour told Dr. Green that the response rate was high because he was paying respondents to participate, a common and accepted practice. After he told that Dr. Green a second run of the experiment had produced similar results, Dr. Green signed on.

Mr. Fleischer said that sometime during the project, “Mike had the strong opinion that we would find that the gay canvassers were doing much better.”

Mr. Fleischer said he was doubtful that would be the result, noting that same-sex marriage advocates differ on whether gay or straight people are better at persuading opponents.

The LaCour-Green findings electrified some in the field. Joshua Kalla, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, saw the study presented before it was published.

“It was very exciting, and partly because it wasn’t just theoretical, it was something that could be applied in campaigns,” he said.

He and a fellow student, David Broockman, who will soon be an assistant professor at Stanford, decided to test the very same approach on another political issue, also working with the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Mr. Fleischer of the center said the issue was transgender equality in Florida. Mr. Kalla and Dr. Broockman paid participants as they thought Mr. LaCour had, but their response rate was only 3 percent.

“We started to wonder, ‘What are we doing wrong?’ ” Mr. Kalla said. “Our response rate was so low, compared to his.”

There are now serious questions about whether Mr. LaCour achieved the high response rate he claimed. He has acknowledged that he did not pay participants as he had claimed, according to Dr. Green and Dr. McNutt, the Science editor in chief.

In a letter that he sent through his lawyer, Dr. McNutt said, Mr. LaCour said he had instead allowed participants the chance to win an iPad, saying “that was incentive enough.” Dr. McNutt said the supposed payments had convinced the reviewers that the response rate was as high as the study reported.

Dr. Green asked Mr. LaCour for the raw data after the study came under fire. Mr. LaCour said in the letter to Dr. McNutt that he erased the raw data months ago, “to protect those who answered the survey,” Dr. McNutt said.

She said that it was possible some voters had responded to some surveys, but that it was most likely that too few had done so to provide enough data to reach persuasive conclusions.

Survey data comes in many forms, and the form that journal peer-reviewers see and that appears with the published paper is the “cleaned” and analyzed data. These are the charts, tables, and graphs that extract meaning from the raw material — piles of questionnaires, transcripts of conversations, “screen grabs” of online forms. Many study co-authors never see the raw material.

Mr. Kalla, trying to find out why he and Dr. Broockman were getting such a low response rate, called the survey company that had been working with Mr. LaCour. The company, which he declined to name, denied any knowledge of the project, he said.

“We were over at Dave’s place, and he was listening to my side of the conversation, and when I hung up,” we just looked at each other, he said. “Then we went right back into the data, because we’re nerdy data guys and that’s what we do.”

On Saturday, they quickly found several other anomalies in Mr. LaCour’s analysis and called their former instructor, Dr. Green. Over the weekend, the three of them, with the help of an assistant professor at Yale, Peter Aronow, discovered that statistical manipulations could easily have accounted for the findings. Dr. Green called Mr. LaCour’s academic adviser, Lynn Vavreck, an associate professor, who confronted Mr. LaCour.

Dr. McNutt of Science said editors there were still grappling with a decision on retracting.

“This has just hit us,” she said. “There will be a lot of time for lessons learned. We’re definitely going to be thinking a lot about this and what could have been done to prevent this from happening.”
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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Who's Afraid of Peer Review?
A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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MIT Tech Rev | Why and How Baidu Cheated an Artificial Intelligence Test
Machine learning gets its first cheating scandal.
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Re: Junk Science: Unintentional errors and outright fraud

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Harvard, Syracuse Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules
by Steve Milloy4 Jun 2015591

E-mails obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two of their researchers appear to have falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted “independent(ly)” of the agency.

In early May, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change purported to support a key EPA claim about its forthcoming global warming rules aimed at coal-fired power plants. The New York Times’ headline, “EPA Emissions Plan Will Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,” typified the media coverage.

Across the media, the authors were innocuously described as simply university-affiliated “researchers.” After all, the researchers had declared they had “no competing financial interests” in their study. Both universities had issued media releases heralding the study as the “first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind.”

Study co-author Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University told the Buffalo News, “I’m an academic, not a politician. I don’t have a dog in this fight.” The claim of independence was also emphatically asserted by study co-author Jonathan Buonocore of Harvard University. “The EPA, which did not participate in the study or interact with its authors, Buonocore says, roundly welcomed its findings.” [Emphasis added].

But a closer look at these claims of independence raises serious doubts.

An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA. Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million. Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants. Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA.

Are we to believe that a group of researchers who had previously received some $45 million in grants from EPA, no doubt hoping for more in the future, could possibly not have any dog in this fight? It’s probably not necessary to ask how this slipped past the incurious mainstream media.

Intrigued by Bounocore’s odd assertion of absolutely no involvement with EPA, I submitted a request to EPA under the Freedom of Information Act for email between the study authors and EPA staff. Although subsequent wrangling with agency staff gave me doubt that I would ever get anything, I received, much to my surprise, 99 pages of emails after mere weeks.

The emails reveal that study co-authors Driscoll, Buonocore, Schwartz and Harvard’s Kathy Lambert were definitely in contact with key EPA staff regarding this research.

A July 8, 2014 email shows Lambert arranging a conference call with EPA staff to get EPA’s input on the study. One of the EPA staff involved was the contact person for agency’s Clean Power Plan cost-benefit analysis. A subsequent e-mail shows that the top EPA staffer on the Clean Power Plan cost-benefit analysis was added to the call.

A July 15, 2014 email from Driscoll to an EPA staffer boasts of “considerable interest” in their analysis from unnamed outside “groups.” One sentence after buttering up the EPA staffer, Driscoll asks her if they could have a phone call to discuss fundraising for a conference Driscoll is organizing. No appearance of attempted financial conflict there?

A November 7, 2014 e-mail from Lambert to EPA about the study reads, “We would like to follow back up with you by phone to discuss possible next steps in this analysis and what role you might be able to play.”

This issue goes deeper than mere truth-telling. The EPA’s controversial Clean Power Plan hinges on the notion that shuttering coal plants will save lives.

The EPA’s proposed global warming plan ostensibly focuses on reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants. But the bulk of the alleged benefits of the plan actually arise from collateral projections of lives supposedly saved by reducing coal plant emissions related to particulate matter and ozone.

As EPA values each life “saved” at about $10 million, the claim that the rules will save 6,600 lives per year puts the rules’ alleged benefits on the order of $66 billion per year, far in excess of industry projections of the rules’ costs.

These EPA claims, however, are controversial to say the least. A compelling alternate view is that no lives will be saved because, for one reason, EPA’s own extensive clinical research shows that particulate matter and ozone in outdoor air do not kill anyone.

The only casualty in this case is our confidence in the independence of EPA-funded researchers.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... ate-rules/
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Junk Science: Pseudoscience, errors, and outright fraud

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Junk Science: Pseudoscience, errors, and outright fraud

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some things are best ignored for ones own sanity.
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Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory

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Interactive included that provides stats good enough to get published in a scientific journal Proving either Republicans or democrats are worse for the economy's depending on your preferences

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sci ... nt-broken/

Science Isn’t Broken

It’s just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for.

By Christie Aschwanden


Graphics by Ritchie King

If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately.

Peer review? More like self-review. An investigation in November uncovered a scam in which researchers were rubber-stamping their own work, circumventing peer review at five high-profile publishers.

Scientific journals? Not exactly a badge of legitimacy, given that the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology recently accepted for publication a paper titled “Get Me Off Your genuflecting Mailing List,” whose text was nothing more than those seven words, repeated over and over for 10 pages. Two other journals allowed an engineer posing as Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel to publish a paper, “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.”

Revolutionary findings? Possibly fabricated. In May, a couple of University of California, Berkeley, grad students discovered irregularities in Michael LaCour’s influential paper suggesting that an in-person conversation with a gay person could change how people felt about same-sex marriage. The journal Science retracted the paper shortly after, when LaCour’s co-author could find no record of the data.

Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really genuflecting hard.

If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result. I could pontificate about all the reasons why science is arduous, but instead I’m going to let you experience one of them for yourself. Welcome to the wild world of p-hacking.


Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory

You’re a social scientist with a hunch: The U.S. economy is affected by whether Republicans or Democrats are in office. Try to show that a connection exists, using real data going back to 1948. For your results to be publishable in an academic journal, you’ll need to prove that they are “statistically significant” by achieving a low enough p-value.
Last edited by Doc on Fri Aug 21, 2015 6:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory

Post by Simple Minded »

Seeing as how some have already said it, it bears repeating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if-UzXIQ5vw
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Re: Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory

Post by noddy »

transparently leverage the synergy of fuzzy, homogeneous configurations

i really struggle to conceal my dismay at the folks that think statistics are science, they really shouldnt be allowed to vote.
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Typhoon
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Re: Junk Science: Poor science, pseudoscience, errors, and f

Post by Typhoon »

May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

Post by YMix »

We should be very scared about CERN

What “CERN” could do to our universe as early as Sept. 24 is terrifying. The goals of CERN are insane.

This is not science-fiction and world-leading physicists such as Stephen Hawking believe CERN could easily and suddenly, without warning, destroy our universe or at least create on earth the apocalyptic events of Revelation, Chapter 6, in the Bible. Please watch the You Tube video titled, CERN ALERT: God Particle Could Destroy Universe Warns S. Hawking.”

Approximately 15 recent Hollywood movies about the sudden destruction of the Earth have shown a digital clock, calendar or newspaper showing Sept. 24, 2015, as the day when the world ends. The “Simpsons” on television showed the sudden destruction of the world with Sept. 24, 2015, shown on a digital clock. The television comedy “Third Rock from the Sun” showed the alien who was the college professor lecturing to his college class, asking, "So what if the earth will be suddenly vaporized without warning on Sept. 24, 2015? The television commercial for the upcoming "Heroes" show this fall, ends the commercial by saying something big is coming and then immediately shows the date Sept. 24, 2015. Recent music videos and music productions on stage also portray the sudden destruction of the Earth.

On May 13, 2014, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius stated more than once during a news conference that we had only 500 days until climate chaos, to which our own Secretary of State John Kerry, who stood beside him, kept shaking his head “yes.” This 500-day period of peace before climate chaos ends Sept. 24, 2015.

Rabi and researcher Jonathan Cahn says that the “Shemitah,” will occur during September, and that one meaning for Shemitah is collapse. The fourth of four blood moons will occur during September and historically, major Earth events occur during the fourth blood moon. Protestant minister John Hagee states that the apocalypse is coming upon us, and apocalypse means tearing down the veil.

Two of the major goals for CERN is to collapse and break apart the God Particle that creates and maintains our physical world and to tear a hole through the veil that is the barrier protecting our physical universe from the unknown, non-physical universes and other non-physical dimensions believed to be located outside our physical universe.

It was the European Organization for Nuclear Research that built CERN, known as the “Large Hadron Collider,” where scientists identified the “God Partical,” called the “Higgs Boson,” during 2012. This is the world’s largest machine, a few stories high, located 300 feet underground, and 17 miles in length. When operating at full speed, within one second, molecular particles will travel 11,000 times around the circular tubes of this 17-mile collider. Earlier, using less than one-third of the energy to run CERN than what will be used Sept. 24, the scientists almost lost control of CERN, as it destroyed the physical matter of the molecular particles inside its collider tubes.
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Re: Junk Science: Poor science, pseudoscience, errors, and f

Post by Typhoon »

Michigan Newspaper Claims the Large Hadron Collider Is Being Used as a "Stargate"

One of interesting things about the US is the large range of outliers.

Some of the smartest people from across all industrialized societies and a disproportionate number of the dumbest, such as the buffoon above.
At least the vocal ones :wink:
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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