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Group think and emotion drives a stake through the heart of reasoned inquiry
Remember Galileo?
In 1632 the Church condemned Galileo Galilei for his belief that the earth revolved around the sun and it wasn't lifted for over 400 years, long after he was shown to be correct.
Maybe by 2400 the global warming deniers will be able to be published again.
For more on the corrupt practices in the science (and media) community read, "Kicking the Sacred Cow" by James Hogan.
"It is the great merit of Galileo that, happily combining experiment with calculation, he opposed the prevailing system according to which, instead of going directly to nature for investigation of her laws and processes, it was held that these were best learned by authority, especially by that of Aristotle, who was supposed to have spoken the last word upon all such matters, and upon whom many erroneous conclusions had been fathered in the course of time. Against such a superstition Galileo resolutely and vehemently set himself, with the result that he not only soon discredited many beliefs which had hitherto been accepted as indisputable..." -- THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA.
As for all the rest, read the actual ecclesiastic judgments of the New Advent Catholic Enyclopedia articles about Galileo here:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06342b.h...
When you do it to me, I don't give a damn, I'll just point you down.
When you do it to people who post to my threads, then I take notice.
Your points might be correct, but nobody is going to listen when you start off the conversation with the wordsome equivalent of, "Hey, idiot!"
Just sayin'.
Science always starts somewhere, and scientists continue to add proof to theories all the time. I did not see freedomforall making the claim that Galileo proved the Earth revolved around the sun-but his theories were powerful and certainly influenced Bessell and Foucault as well as countless other discoverers
There are a lot of political (i.e., power) issues that have threatened the scientific method for centuries.
Some info here indictates that the leaders of the church were still waffling in the 1990s on their dealing with Galileo :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_aff...
Thats the entire issue with today's consensus scientific study, its not science at all its agenda driven propaganda.
Fanelli D (2014) Publishing: rise in retractions is a signal of integrity. Nature - doi:10.1038/509033a
which rehashed this publication:
Fanelli D (2013) Why growing retractions are (mostly) a good sign. PLoS Medicine - DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001563
My problem here, k, is that Town Hall caters to people who want to believe what they read there. Once you start to dig for facts, you find the truth, even as presented, is somewhat more complicated.
Moreover, as Adlai Stevenson, the failed presidential candidate correctly observed, "We Americans are suckers for good news". I read this yesterday within "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin.
Fanelli collaborated with Ioannidis on two papers:
Fanelli D & JPA Ioannidis (2014) Re-analyses actually confirm that US studies may overestimate effect sizes in softer research. PNAS - DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1322565111
Fanelli D & JPA Ioannidis (2013) US studies may overestimate effect sizes in softer research. PNAS - DOI:10.1073/pnas.1302997110
I, too, have published the same research twice by tweaking it into a new article. It makes the bibliography bigger. That these two stalwarts also succumb to a venal sin is not entirely condemnatory.
But everyone focuses on big name schools because most people only read headlines. As noted, "conservatives" react to fear. Seeking good news is not natural to them.
In our class, we read PLASTIC FANTASTIC by Eugenie Samuel Reich about Jan Hendrick Schoen, and VOODOO SCIENCE (and other titles) by Dr. Robert L. Park. Schoen, in particular, is infamous for his gaming of _Nature_ and _Science_ (as well as Bell Labs and Lucent). But again, the revelation of a criminal does not condemn the public space in which he perpetrated.
On my blog are reviews of books about bad science here:
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2013/...
I have another blog about research misconduct and fraud in police laboratories. That began as a talk to middle school students for a University of Michigan "Super Science Friday". See here:
http://csiflint2011.blogspot.com/
"From junk science and fraudulent laboratory results in courtrooms, to misconduct in scientific research, to fake experiments, and to plagiarism, the criminal science investigator ensures honesty within the halls of science and the halls of justice. The Office of Research Integrity of the US Department of Health and Human Services is the top of the CSI pyramid.
Every research university has its own “institutional review board” to ensure that experiments conform to best practices. Students at all levels in all disciplines are bound by an equivalent code of honor.
In the picture above, it would be easy to assume that the woman to our right, in blue, is the Guardian. But law enforcement often depends on the findings of scientists, technicians, and other professionals. Who, then, is the guardian? "
"As noted, "conservatives" react to fear. Seeking good news is not natural to them. "
it makes me want to smack you instead. When you state that you take 45 minutes or longer to frame up your comments and then you insult people with no proof, I'd say, you choose your words for 45 minutes and insult without thinking
So, each of them, believing that they are brilliant, special, best, and brightest, descend upon those of us who wish to be left alone and then they inflict their moral responsibility on us by finding unbroken shit to fix.
It's unending.
But, thanks.
Institutional review boards can only do so much. The peer review process is supposed to identify research misconduct. As a reviewer, I often am reviewing papers that I know the general subject, but not all of what everyone in the field has done. Catching fraud is not an easy thing to do. I have seen where The Journal of the American Chemical Society asks, but does not require, its reviewers to attempt to replicate research results. That is a lot to ask.
A chemist who was one of my old bosses said that he couldn't reproduce half of what was in the published literature. That is consistent with my experience, too. Research fraud is a serious problem.
As for conservatives not seeking good news, until I read AS, I was overly optimistic. I am definitely personally conservative, although I would govern as a libertarian. I have always wanted to assume that everyone was of high moral character and good will, until they gave me cause to think otherwise.
Are they?
Prof. Buckeridge teaches engineering ethics. He sent me an autographed copy of the book after mischance brought us together. (Story there; some other time.) I have given these problems serious professional development. It was on that basis that I found this article from Town Hall disappointing. I just read all of Ionnidi's paper cited there. I wonder who else did ... or felt they needed to...
If the moral panic of Town Hall were justified, Ionnidis would have been pushed off a tall building like an inconvenient banker. Instead, he teaches at Stanford.
Town Hall's Patrick Michael blundered with this: "At a tier-one University, to publish the requisite number of papers for promotion in, say, the Environmental Sciences, probably requires a minimum of $2.5 million. That’s a lot of overhead for the Germanic Languages Department." I must ask: WHICH "tier-one university"? It is the kind of convenient truth that every reader wants to accept and so will without question. Furthermore, much can be said for the value in studying Germanic languages (among others) if you care about epistemology.
Town Hall also cited a Guardian op-ed from Nobel Laureate Randy Scheckman. Again, these revelations are open to all. Nothing is being conspiratorially hidden. It is all part of the open debate that is the hallmark of science. You cannot encourage and demand audits and then complain when audits reveal problems. That is why we have them. Science demands audits. Thus, as noted "the Journal of Vibration and Control, retracted sixty papers, after an internal investigation revealed a fraudulent “peer review and citation process”..." The problem is not that these were retracted. That is proof of the validity of the process.
Finally, I encourage to actually read the writings of Vannevar Bush. For us Objectivists, they do preview the disasters of the State Science Institute. However, all he said at the time was that everything should be funded (within broad "reason") because you never know where the next invention will come from. Nothing more. Nothing less. Again, we know the underlying problem, but it is a different one than this.
Patrick J. Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, Even I disagree with some CATO policy, but I would not suggest they are spammers. -1
He cites three scientists and two studies in support of his claim the number of positively associated federally funded studies is at all time highs especially in the areas of climate change. Written by a remarkably small number of big academic names, whose research is being used to shape policy globally. Have you read the goals of the UNIPCC?! Myself, I have received NSF emails and calls for white papers (funding notices really) in climate change with specific hypotheses. Even in government science funding, dollars are considered scarce-so the larger your publishing CV, the more likely the dollars steer toward you. Scientists in climate change studies have been shown over and over to not only manipulate data but falsify data. Finally a big name gets caught out peer reviewing his own paper under an alias. At this particular publisher, due diligence won out-after a hue and cry came up to scrutinize their publication!
You have taken several quotes out of context here-I'll focus on one.
"At a tier-one University, to publish the requisite number of papers for promotion in, say, the Environmental Sciences, probably requires a minimum of $2.5 million. That’s a lot of overhead for the Germanic Languages Department."
Science requires big bucks in laboratories and testing equipment and the like. Hardly the resources a specific language department needs in and of itself. ALL tier-one universities show investments like that for certain sciences in time and talent and equipment-this is hardly a specious claim.
FIT has increased in size over the last 10 years, but is pretty close to where we plan on being after that.