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18 Mar 2009 05:16
Cherry-picking and more
Shankar Vedantam, "A Silenced Drug Study Creates An Uproar," Washington Post, March 18, 2009, here.
-- Edward Tufte, March 18, 2009
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12 Mar 2009 01:52
The New York Times, March 11, 2009: "In what may be among the longest-running and widest-ranging cases of academic fraud, one of the most prolific researchers in anesthesiology has admitted that he fabricated much of the data underlying his research." "The researcher...never conducted the clinical trials that he wrote about in 21 journal articles... ." Big pharma is mentioned... NYT home page search: "neuropathic pain medicines"
-- David (email), March 10, 2009
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04 Mar 2009 07:01
Yet more on the relationship between medical schools and the pharmaceutical industry (see ET's entry of 24 Nov 2008): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/03medschool.html?ref=business .
-- Stewart Schoder (email), March 3, 2009
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17 Dec 2008 08:57
Related to ET's post of 24 November 2008, more from the Times on the disturbing relationship between pharmaceutical companies and academia: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/business/13wyeth.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1229489889-Hb6NuVemLHQCnY/S2UUQNQ .
-- Stewart Schoder (email), December 16, 2008
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04 Dec 2008 15:53
I found the article about air resistance very interesting, and, like the authors of one of the texts quoted, I was surprised at how big the effect is.
A similar (more elementary) case in biology where the textbooks say something that contradicts the everyday experience of some readers is the description of human eye colour in elementary accounts of Mendelian genetics. The general idea is that brown eyes are dominant over blue, so if both parents have blue eyes then so do their children; if either parent is homozygotic for brown eyes then the children have brown eyes, but if either or both parents are heterozygotic the child's eyes may be either brown or blue. All that is true enough if we confine attention to people whose eyes are bright blue or dark brown, but that leaves out a lot of people who will read the textbook account and wonder how it applies to them. My eyes are neither brown nor blue, and there are plenty of other people who can say the same. Of course, it's fine for a textbook to describe the simplest case, but it's important to say that it is the simplest case and that real life is often more complicated.
-- Athel Cornish-Bowden (email), December 4, 2008
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02 Dec 2008 23:38
Posner on Blink
Advocacy vs. evidence
Passive voice useful at times
Spotting problems by spotting passive verbs
Who did what in scientific work
What did Darwin mean?
Latour big think
It's more complicated than that
Pun misused?
New draft now posted at top of thread, ET replies
More on use of "pun"
Reasoning by sloppy analogy
Dequantification to smooth results
Duplicity
Duplicity vs. pun
Cherry picking
Cherry picking
Grading oneself not good evidence
Overreaching names
Why most published research findings are false
Bullet points and passive voice road to victory
Detecting scientific fabrication
Funding our conclusions
Corrupt results in physics textbooks
See "Introductory physics: The new scholasticism" by Sanjoy Mahajan, Physics Department, University of Cambridge, and David W. Hogg, Physics Department, New York University at
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0412107v2
-- Edward Tufte, December 2, 2008
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01 Dec 2008 17:45
As documents refuse to die, so too their lessons. Though this item is now three years old, it bears reiteration. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman identified the pernicious infiltration of "slideware-speak" into the highest levels of thinking within _our_ Executive Branch: "The National Security Council document released this week under the grandiose title 'National Strategy for Victory in Iraq' is neither an analytical report nor a policy statement. It's simply the same old talking points, 'victory in Iraq is a vital U.S. interest,' 'failure is not an option,' repackaged in the form of a slide presentation for a business meeting. It's an embarrassing piece of work." Paul Krugman, Bullet Points Over Baghdad, The New York Times, Dec. 2, 2005. See for yourself, the document is still online: www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq_national_strategy_20051130.pdf
-- David Johnson (email), December 1, 2008
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27 Nov 2008 00:10
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26 Nov 2008 20:07
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