Year: 2014

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Won’t somebody *please* think of the validity?

I’ve concluded that they’re right. Mobile phones DO addle the brain. They DO interfere with competent cognition. They DO cause people to become rambling, incoherent, and negligent thinkers, and to talk ever-more-ridiculous garbage. But their effects are quite subtle. They cause this result in some people simply by existing: all these folks […]

Telling parents how vaccines are safe makes them *less* likely to vaccinate their kids

Here’s a classic science communication fiasco. Many of us believe empiricism enables the resolution of uncertainty with data, and that more information is better than less. That’s why we do science. One of the moral imperatives that drive us is that carefully scrutinized, systematically replicable, and objectively verifiable information trumps […]

Just a few (i.e. 120) “gibberish” research papers redacted

It’s akin to the Sokal hoax of our digital age, with a touch of Frankenstein in there too, and possibly some monkeys with typewriters. Two major publishers, Springer and IEEE, have identified over 120 papers that made it through their peer-review process but which were actually generated using a software package designed to […]