Posted on 07/26/2014 12:31:00 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were sure to get a positive review for placement in the journal. In one case, a paper's author gave glowing reviews to his own work using phony names.
Acoustics is an important field. But in biomedicine faulty research and a dubious peer-review process can have life-or-death consequences. In June, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and responsible for $30 billion in annual government-funded research, held a meeting to discuss ways to ensure that more published scientific studies and results are accurate. According to a 2011 report in the monthly journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, the results of two-thirds of 67 key studies analyzed by Bayer researchers from 2008-2010 couldn't be reproduced.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Social ‘scientist’ have always falsified data. With the anthropogenic global warming religion we have massive falsification of data in the ‘hard’ sciences.
No ‘peers’ are going to defy the new religious orthodoxy masquerading as science. Their careers, even their lives, are at stake.
Follow the money. Hoaxes have an unfortunate but common history in science (Piltdown man lasted about 30 years). Eventually the facts will out but it can be expensive in lives and money in the mean time. Universities, in their lust for grants, are as bad as anyone.
This has been well known but largely ignored. John Ioannidis has been exploring the issue for over a decade. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._A._Ioannidis
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wears-off
The Truth Wears Off
Is there something wrong with the scientific method?
Snip...
The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. It feels good to validate a hypothesis, Ioannidis said. It feels even better when youve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And thats why, even after a claim has been systematically disprovenhe cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitaminsyou still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that its true.
/snip
Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war peace’ activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and gay’ rights groups.
....
In 1923, the Frankfurt School-a Marxist think-tank-was founded in Weimar Germany. Among its founders were Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno. The school was a multidisciplinary effort which included sociologists, sexologists, and psychologists.
The primary goal of the Frankfurt School was to translate Marxism from economic terms into cultural terms. It would provide the ideas on which to base a new political theory of revoltuion based on culture, harnessing new oppressed groups for the faithless proletariat. Smashing religion, morals, It would also build a constituency among academics, who could build careers studying and writing about the new oppression.
...
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/cultural_marxism.html
If the “science” supports an anti-Christian agenda or implies that the federal government needs to intervene in the economy, then it’s probably pseudoscience. That’s a pretty useful tactic for people who want to recognize pseudoscience, but just don’t have time to learn all the principles and jargon necessary to do so. Another useful tactic can be to read the Bible, which for 2000 years has managed to keep a 100% track record on historical and scientific matters.
“Peer review” means nothing when all the “peers” have the same goal of leeching off of taxpayer dollars. Thus, alarmism and inconclusive gibberish rule the day with the National Academy of Sciences and other institutions which don’t care to apply their science. Useful and factual science is done by applying it (i.e. engineers and doctors), the very people the Leftists hate.
A good summary from the Economist last year is here:
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble
Peer review is all about “consensus” now instead of “verifiability, reproducibility, and honesty.”
If anyone tries to publish something contrary to the accepted dogma, they shriek as if someone molested the statue of the goddess in the temple.
Especially if it is contrary to the Global Warming religion.
So much science isn’t science.
And if you display a skeptical attitude to the “science”. they call you anti-science.
HINT: People who actually care about science are always skeptical. The people who take the “science” on faith and get upset when the dogma is questioned, are not actually scientists.
Those who corrupt the science for political gain want everyone to think it is more complicated than it actually is.
Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century
Eugenics was one huge fraudulent science, supported by the top names in “evolutionary biology”. It was taught in schools as fact, there were journals devoted to it, academic societies, etc. The scientific merits of eugenics lie somewhere between palmstry and wiccan magick.
Ernest Lawrence, a pure experimentalist... said, "Don't you worry about it -- the theorists will find a way to make them all the same." -- Alvarez by Luis Alvarez (page 184)Ping to several lists.
I must reiterate my feeling that experimentalists always welcome the suggestions of the theorists. But the present situation is ridiculous... In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which proposals rather than proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster to be visited upon the scientific community in this century. No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me that he thought I was making a big mistake. He supported me because my track record was good. I believe U.S. science could recover from the stultifying effects of decades of misguided peer reviewing if we returned to the tried-and-true method of evaluating experimenters rather than experimental proposals. Many people will say that my ideas are elitist, and I certainly agree. The alternative is the egalitarianism that we now practice and that I've seen nearly kill basic science in the USSR and in the People's Republic of China. -- ibid (pp 200-201)
As usual, Feynman is correct. If your theory’s prediction do not agree with experiments then your theory is wrong.
Climate Change “Science” is the most obvious example of a theory that fails the Feynman test. But, while less widely recognized, HIV equals AIDS also fails that test.
As a general rule whenever the science is declared “settled” you can be assured that is neither settled nor science.
I’m like, almost totally shocked. I suspect somewhere in the process is a single enabling point but it’s just a hunch. Gotta wonder just who the gatekeepers are for dog and pony science. </conspiracy>
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