The Left Gets A Pass....Again

So we hear a lot about the "anti-science" views of the conservative Right.  The folks who deny evolution to the point of claiming that Neanderthals and dinosaurs roamed the same earth, at the same time.

Fair enough.  That's pretty bad.

But why don't we hear about the anti-science views of the Left?  I don't mean just the market-deniers who believe in magic and think that a benevolent Lord called "DeState" will take care of them, either.

What about the Truthers?

The GMO-nuts?

The vaccine-deniers?

On the last of these, there is quite a funny video.  Dr. House (of Cards):

Retraction Penalty

The Retraction Penalty: Catastrophe and Consequence in Scientific Teams 
Ginger Zhe Jin et al. 
NBER Working Paper, October 2013 

 Abstract: What are the individual rewards to working in teams? This question extends across many production settings but is of long-standing interest in science and innovation, where the "Matthew Effect" suggests that eminent team members garner credit for great works at the expense of less eminent team members. In this paper, we study this question in reverse, examining highly negative events - article retractions. Using the Web of Science, we investigate how retractions affect citations to the authors' prior publications. We find that the Matthew Effect works in reverse - namely, scientific misconduct imposes little citation penalty on eminent coauthors. By contrast, less eminent coauthors face substantial citation declines to their prior work, and especially when they are teamed with an eminent author. A simple Bayesian model is used to interpret the results. These findings suggest that a good reputation can have protective properties, but at the expense of those with less established reputations.

Nod to Kevin Lewis

THe Nature of Science, or the Science of Nature

So, a study shows that research on mice is nearly useless, in some areas, for understanding effects on humans.  Or, worse than useless, actually misleading.  Science and Nature are two places to publish big, important, but perhaps speculative papers.

Excerpt:

The study’s investigators tried for more than a year to publish their paper, which showed that there was no relationship between the genetic responses of mice and those of humans. They submitted it to the publications Science and Nature, hoping to reach a wide audience. It was rejected from both.


Science and Nature said it was their policy not to comment on the fate of a rejected paper, or whether it had even been submitted to them. But, Ginger Pinholster of Science said, the journal accepts only about 7 percent of the nearly 13,000 papers submitted each year, so it is not uncommon for a paper to make the rounds.

Still, Dr. Davis said, reviewers did not point out scientific errors. Instead, he said, “the most common response was, ‘It has to be wrong. I don’t know why it is wrong, but it has to be wrong.’ ”   Um....it has to be wrong because otherwise we have wasted billions of dollars as a result of forcing people to do studies on mice, when those studies are actively misleading about effects on humans?  Because we know THAT's not right.  Right?

Fear....the FROG!

IRB should have turned this down; it involves deception.

So, froggy took a hand.


(Nod to the Blonde)

Bruno's Idiocy Comes Home to Roost

Bruno Latour (who should have been a porn star, with that name. Far better than the intellectual pornography he sold as scholarship!) is surprised anyone took him seriously.

Okay, he's got a point. No one should have taken him seriously. He claimed that planes don't fly, that color tvs don't really work, and that nothing really is real. It's all socially constructed.

And somehow he got this from misreading Kuhn. (Don't just read on, that link is cool!). Latour wrote drivel like this. (Feel FREE to skip that link).

I have long been amused at how many people whose bizarre minds give them no hope of understanding science use Kuhn as a shield, saying there is no SUCH THING as science. Yeah, I hope that works out for you, pumpkin. Read some more French philosophers, by all means. And get hilariously hoodwinked by Dr. Sokol, of course.

Anyway, having sown the wind, now they can reap the climate change denier whirlwind. Far and away most Americans believe that climate science is fabricated, at least in part. Socially constructed, indeed.

And the response by Bruno Latour? Two parts, both delightful.

1. I never really meant that. Never meant what I said I meant, it was all just an intellectual exercise. Lighten up!
2. Besides, in spite of everything I said about science being socially constructed and unreliable, and measurement being impossible, we ALL KNOW that global warming is real, a fact, an undeniable truth.

Golly, Bruno, and you know that...how?

The answer, as always with the left, is that their feelings, their group-think intuitions, generally anything they happen to believe? THOSE are facts.

Actual facts? Things like prices, scarcity, logic, evidence? THOSE are socially constructed. Nice.

He Crashed to the Earth, Crying in Rage

A sad story.

Strange in retrospect that we were afraid of them. The Soviets were really best at harming their own citizens.

Mavs fail chemistry 101

The Dallas Mavericks have acquired Caron Butler, Brendan Haywood and DeShawn Stevenson from the Wizards.

They didn't give up very much. Just a curiously ineffective Josh Howard, Drew Gooden, James Singleton, and Quinton Ross.

On paper, it seems like a good deal, except for the fact that Haywood and Stevenson are total knuckleheads.

Plus, I am not a rider on the Caron Butler bandwagon. He gets a lot of good press around the league, but to me he's borderline knucklehead too.

Bottom line is that I don't think this trade puts the Mavericks any deeper into the playoffs than they were already going before it happened.