:-))

centralscience:

“Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.”

—

Frederick Soddy (via fuckyeahelements)

well said! we shape our reality (and other’s reality shapes us)

inthenoosphere:

“The earlier concept of a universe made up of physical particles interacting according to fixed laws is no longer tenable. It is implicit in present findings that action rather than matter is basic This is good news, for it is no longer appropriate to think of the universe as a gradually subsiding agitation of billiard balls. The universe, far from being a desert of inert particles, is a theatre of increasingly complex organization, a stage for development in which man has a definite place, without any upper limit to his evolution.”

— Arthur M. Young

that is very true indeed. observing this behaviour alll the time with myself, working quite well and even boosted by browser cache…

inthenoosphere:

“Memories are becoming hyperlinks to information triggered by keywords and URLs. We are becoming ‘persistent paleontologists’ of our own external memories, as our brains are storing the keywords to get back to those memories and not the full memories themselves.”

—

Amber Case

and on it goes. This one is about incorrect statistical treatment of data, one of the darker corners of the scientific building…

We all like to laugh at quacks when they misuse basic statistics. But what if academics, en masse, deploy errors that are equally foolish? This week Sander Nieuwenhuis and colleagues publish a mighty torpedo in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

They’ve identified one direct, stark statistical error that is so widespread it appears in about half of all the published papers surveyed from the academic neuroscience research literature.

To understand the scale of this problem, first we have to understand the statistical error they’ve identified. This is slightly difficult, and it will take 400 words of pain. At the end, you will understand an important aspect of statistics better than half the professional university academics currently publishing in the field of neuroscience.

Read the full article by Ben Goldacre.

Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis analyse the low number of cancer-research studies that have been converted into clinical success, and conclude that a major factor is the overall poor quality of published preclinical data. A warning sign, they say, should be the “shocking” number of research papers in the field for which the main findings could not be reproduced. To be clear, this is not fraud — and there can be legitimate technical reasons why basic research findings do not stand up in clinical work. But the overall impression the article leaves is of insufficient thoroughness in the way that too many researchers present their data.

The finding resonates with a growing sense of unease among specialist editors on this journal, and not just in the field of oncology. Across the life sciences, handling corrections that have arisen from avoidable errors in manuscripts has become an uncomfortable part of the publishing process.

…

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.

“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”

Read the full article , from Derek Lowe’s weblog.

Folks, if this is the new way of doing science (and there are signs it is), we are utterly and ultimately f***ed up.

Instead of presenting the results from repeatedly reproduced experiments, more and more researchers tend to throw their first “successful” results against us, driven by wishful thinking and a craving for publicity and spectacular results.

We all would be better of if they had come to produce results from within a backyard deckchair, driven by shear imagination; instead of wasting endless efforts in time, money and lab space. Even worse, multi-million pharmaceutical development programs are doomed to failure,  based on basic assumptions and academic findings that have never been found in a sound, founded way.

What a miserable road to the future we are on. Not much “glory of science” left. Better of as a craftsman than perpetually feeling ashamed for belonging to the natural scientists’ guild. Ahh, this makes me really upset… I should even consider giving back my PhD…

you understand?

inthenoosphere:

“If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.”

—

Lyall Watson