Latest version of Flock reaches 0.7
In probably what is the last alpha build before the beta is released (codename Cardinal), I’ve installed version 0.7
This release has a nice little widget that allows blog posts to be made in front of the post or page you are looking at. One of the things I’d most like is to be able to get more functionality for my WordPress blogs.
Like the previous release (0.5.14) the release is stable, but just lacks features I think should be there. Maybe I’ll join the developer discussion on this.
Who peer reviews Nature?
As if Nature’s woes in the area of reputable science weren’t bad enough after the Hwang woo Wuk affair a while ago, it now appears that Nature can’t do a properly organized experiment itself.
Witness the story in the Register on the experiment by Nature which purported to compare the scholarship of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study appeared to show that the Encyclopedia Britannica had quite a few errors, nearly as many as Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, that’s wrong, because Britannica audited the experiment:
Nature magazine has some tough questions to answer after it let its Wikipedia fetish get the better of its responsibilities to reporting science. The Encyclopedia Britannica has published a devastating response to Nature’s December comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica, and accuses the journal of misrepresenting its own evidence.
Where the evidence didn’t fit, says Britannica, Nature’s news team just made it up. Britannica has called on the journal to repudiate the report, which was put together by its news team.
Independent experts were sent 50 unattributed articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica, and the journal claimed that Britannica turned up 123 “errors” to Wikipedia’s 162.
But Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children’s version and Britannica’s “book of the year” to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry.
Nice “Mash-Up” – but bad science.
“Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading,” says Britannica.
“Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.”
In one case, for example. Nature’s peer reviewer was sent only the 350 word introduction to a 6,000 word Britannica article on lipids – which was criticized for containing omissions.
A pattern also emerges which raises questions about the choice of the domain experts picked by Nature’s journalists.
Several got their facts wrong, and in many other cases, simply offered differences of opinion.
“Dozens of the so-called inaccuracies they attributed to us were nothing of the kind; they were the result of reviewers expressing opinions that differed from ours about what should be included in an encyclopedia article. In these cases Britannica’s coverage was actually sound.”
Perhaps they were simply trying to cherrypick “a few good men” for a particular result? How can anyone mistakenly “simply [stitch] together bits from different articles and [insert] its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry”?
The Britannica’s devastating response to Nature’s Wikipedia comparison is here [pdf]
If these people cannot conduct a simple side-by-side comparison between two sources of data themselves without serious errors and possible misconduct, how can Nature represent itself as a judge of others?
For the benefit of scientific misconduct shenanigans, this is for you :
We discovered in Nature’s work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results. We contacted Nature, asking for the original data, calling their attention to several of their errors, and offering to meet with them to review our findings in full, but they declined.
Further, the Britannica response says:
However, contrary to the usual practice of making all data freely available in order to facilitate a study’s replication by others, Nature declined our repeated requests to make the full reports available.
Here we have a journal behaving in this (in my opinion) highhanded and unethical manner. Who to go to when a journal behaves badly?
The main point of all of this is that in the case of errors or omissions of fact, Encyclopedia Britannica’s publishers take responsiblity to correct errors and justify their scholarship whereas Wikipedia’s publishers appear to bear no such responsibility. And, it appears, neither does the editor of Nature.
technorati tags: Nature, Wikipedia, replication, audit, disclosure
Testing Flock
This post is actually being written from the latest bleeding-edge iteration of Flock, a fork of Firefox that incorporates blogging and other fun stuff into the browser.
Hopefully this should turn out OK.
Flock can be found at http://www.flock.com
“The Science is settled” #2
John Quiggin, economist.
There’s no longer any serious debate among climate scientists about either the reality of global warming or about the fact that its substantially caused by human activity…
“The science is settled” #1
Another of these recurring memes I like to spot. This one is a rhetorical technique used to shutdown debate in the absence of unambiguous data.
#1: Dr Kurt M. Cuffey
Mounting evidence has forced an end to any serious scientific debate on whether humans are causing global warming. This is an event of historical significance, but one obscured from public view by the arcane technical literature and the noise generated by perpetual partisans.
……
But now, after this summer of 2005, the serious scientific debate about global warming has ended. There is now no reasonable doubt that atmospheric pollution is causing global warming, and this warming is strong enough to have serious consequences in the next century.
Scientific phrases and their meanings
This could start a continuing series of things like this. The world of science and scientists is a lot more fun packed than most people would believe.
This from Warren J. Siegel, and it concerns some of those scientific sounding terms found in most published theory papers:
“their exciting new result” —– “We can’t find anything better to work on.”
“we extend the results of” —– “We do the real work.”
“confirming our earlier results” —– “They couldn’t calculate anything either.”
“in complete agreement with experiment” —– “SSC is dead.”
“To begin” —– “… the boring part”
“can be described by the equation” —– “Skip the next bit.”
“as we recall from the previous section” —– “Better skip this section, too.”
“beyond the scope of this paper” —– “We don’t understand this part.”
“In conclusion” —– “Thank goodness.”
“our results differ from those of” —– “Jerks.”
“in a future paper” —– “I want a job.”
“in preparation” —– “We’re stuck.”
“Your theory is beautiful.” —– “Your blind date has a nice personality.”
“We’ll have to save further questions for the end of the talk.” —– “You’ve found the crucial flaw in the theory, so give everyone a chance to run away before it hits the fan.”
There’s a lot more fun parodying of science on that website, so if you have a scientific sense of humor, then take a look.
Star Trek Engineer goes bust
This one was reported in the Register
Obsessive Trekkie Tony Alleyne has spent so much cash turning his flat into a replica of the Star Trek Voyager that he’s had to declare himself bankrupt.
Alleyne spent £12,000 converting his flat in Hinckley, Leicestershire, into a detailed replica of the Voyager spaceship. The flat has its own transporter room (not functioning), blue downlights (to give the illusion of being ‘beamed up’), touch sensitive control screens, and portholes in place of windows. Last week he was declared bankrupt at Coventry Crown Court with debts of £166,000.
Now I’m as cynical as the next person, but insanity and genius are not too far away from each other. He tried to setup a business to do Star Trek-style interior design but it never really came off.
Check out his website. Maybe he could clear his debt by charging admission to Star Trek freaks or even selling the flat as a curiosity.
