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Vox published an interesting story today about the replication crisis in science. If you’re not familiar with this idea, it’s the fact that a significant percentage of all of the peer-reviewed social science that has been published in the past can not be replicated by other scientists, which is a pretty clear sign that the claims made in the original papers aren’t true. How bad is the situation. This bad: In an attempt to test just how rigorous scientific research is, some researchers have undertaken the task of replicating research that’s been published in a whole range of fields. And...

Early in health officials’ response to the pandemic, one drug offered hope of a safe, widely available, and cheap therapeutic that would break the death grip that COVID-19 held on the world. However, after its promised efficacy didn’t materialize in large, statistically significant numbers, enthusiasm for the drug, hydroxychloroquine, quickly waned. Why, then, has it made its way back into the headlines? When it was first suggested that hydroxychloroquine may be an effective antiviral against the new coronavirus, which scientists call SARS-CoV-2, the U.S. government purchased and delivered the drug by the millions of doses even before research could prove...

How many tens of thousands of Americans must die because of Dr. Fauci’s mistakes? It is becoming more and more apparent with each new day and as more information is accumulated that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, the CDC and the FDA failed in their response to the China Coronavirus. * * * Perhaps Dr. Fauci’s most deadly mistake is his response to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) treatments for the disease. Dr. Fauci cheered the use of hydroxychloroquine in treating the MERS coronavirus in 2013 but for some reason resists its use today in treating the China coronavirus. Now there is a...

In a video posted Monday online, a group of people calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” and wearing white medical coats spoke against the backdrop of the Supreme Court in Washington, sharing misleading claims about the virus, including that hydroxychloroquine was an effective coronavirus treatment and that masks did not slow the spread of the virus. The video did not appear to be anything special. But within six hours, President Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had tweeted versions of it, and the right-wing news site Breitbart had shared it. It went viral, shared largely through Facebook groups dedicated to...

International Firearms Ownership and Homicides In 2016 Adam Lankford of the University of Alabama, published a paper examining the distribution of mass shooting/mass shooters around the world. The published result concluded the United States had a disproportionate number of these rare events.  Lankford's study showed the United States had 5% of the world's population, but 31% of the the mass shootings/mass shooters, as defined by Lankford.  It has become clear that Lankford was looking almost exclusively at single perpetrators, though he included about 2% where two people were involved. Lankford excluded terrorist attacks he identified as “sponsored” terrorism, but included...

They say the first step is admitting you have a problem. I think many readers of this article will respond with outrage, and many will see it says things they already knew to be true—and I think these two groups will largely overlap. The most powerful obstacle to confronting a destructive addiction is denial, and collectively we are in denial about pornography. Since it seems somehow relevant, let me state at the outset that I am French. Every fiber of my Latin, Catholic body recoils at puritanism of any sort, especially the bizarre, Anglo-Puritan kind so prevalent in America. I...

The realm of practical politics is eminently a realm of conflict, if not hatred. It crowds out culture. It relegates the human things to the last remaining cubicles of privacy, but even these are invaded by social media. Many years ago, when I was teaching at Providence College, I showed up for a meeting of the faculty senate. That was rare for me. I loathe campus politics. But a friend of mine had put forward a proposal for a program in Classics, and I attended to lend my support. It turned out that on the same day, a professor of...

Helen Hudson will tell you what the 15th Ward was like when she was a girl. In the 1950s and early ’60s, the Syracuse neighborhood was home to thousands of predominantly black residents who had settled in the growing upstate New York city during and after the Great Migration. Those who remember it, like Hudson, describe it as thriving, self-sufficient community they were proud to call home. “Oh my god, the things we had,” she said recently, her voice softening with the distinct twang of nostalgia. “We had two bowling alleys. We had meat markets.” Charlie Pierce-El will tell you...

Syracuse, N.Y. – The discussion and analysis about the future of Interstate 81 has gone on for a decade. When will the $2 billion project be done? Well, we may be nearly halfway there. One estimated end date is 2030. That’s from a two-sentence section within the 15,000-page draft environmental report that the state released in late April, according to a review by syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. “Year 2020 was the year of estimated time of completion when the analysis was started a few years ago. However, due to schedule changes, the estimated time of completion is projected to be...

On Monday, the Democrat controlled House Committee on Appropriations allocated $50 million more for Public Health research. These medical professionals try applying the tools that they developed for disease to study crime, accidental death, and suicide. Despite these claims, the much reviled Dickey Amendment never actually forbade research funded by the Centers for Disease Control. It simply stated: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” The Amendment came in response to top CDC officials advocating various gun control laws,...

If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in "academic journals." The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what's taught at colleges today. Recently, three people sent in intentionally ridiculous "research" to prominent journals of women studies, gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, obesity studies and queer studies. "The scholarship in these disciplines is utterly corrupted," says Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. "They have placed an agenda before the truth." To show that, hoaxer and mathematician James Lindsay says, "We rewrote a section of...

You have GOT to read this, from Quillette! It starts with this editor’s note: Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in...

Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia. (Emphasis...

Perhaps the most puzzling thing about autism and ADD is that more than a decade into this public health crisis, our best, smartest government scientists and public health officials still say they have no idea what's causing it. Scary stuff, when parents having a child today realize there's at least an estimated 1 in 150 chance their child will have an autism disorder (1 in 90 if it's a boy). While the government has been utterly unable to stop it, or even tell us what is causing it, they say they do know one thing: it's not vaccines. But today,...

The University of North Carolina, Charlotte, offers a staggering 345 courses on the topic of diversity and social justice. The University of North Carolina, Charlotte released a list of their “Diversity Courses” that spans 21 pages and covers academic disciplines such as Religious Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Languages and Culture Studies, and Africana Studies. Although it’s unclear why UNC Charlotte needs so many “Diversity Courses,” Associate Dean Shawn Long says that the topics discussed in such courses are beneficial to all of the members of the school’s community. “When we consider the concept of diversity, broadly speaking, we mean...

A university is refusing to allow a counselor who specializes in transgender mental health to study transgender people who regret having a sex change because the school says the study isn’t politically correct. James Caspian, a U.K. psychotherapist seeking to write a master thesis on transgenders who transition back to their birth gender at the U.K.’s Bath Spa University, explained that he thought it was important to study people who had transitioned and then changed their minds after receiving sex-reassignment surgery because no research has been conducted on this group of people. “I was astonished at that decision,” Caspian told...

Grant: Alcohol is 'integral component of bars and clubs'! The National Institutes of Health is spending over $400,000 studying whether gender norms of masculinity and femininity lead LGBTQ individuals to drink too much. Trying to find the "meanings of intoxication" of sexual and gender minorities is the central question of a study that was awarded in late July. The project will "examine the extent to which gendered norms shape risky drinking practices for sexual and gender minority (SGM) young adults," according to the grant for the study. The grant states that alcohol is an "integral component of bars and clubs."...

In July Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe stood on the platform of a train station in Alexandria to announce that the U.S. Department of Transportation had granted $165 million for the Atlantic Gateway project.While this is a multimodal project featuring rail, bus, and highway improvements, it was clearly the latter that most enthused the governor. At one point during his remarks, he declared that because of the road projects, “Today, the congestion is going to end!”The primary focus of the highway improvements will be an extension of the HOT (high occupancy toll) lanes on I-95 and I-395. The only other speaker...

Not everyone is thrilled with U.S. Rep. John Larson’s proposal to build massive highway tunnels under Hartford, but Daniel Burnham might be, were he still with us. It was Burnham, the great Chicago architect and planner, who said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.”Larson’s is anything but a little plan; it is breathtaking in scope. It has stirred the blood of some public officials and business leaders. But the concept is so vast, complex and potentially expensive – it would be longer than Boston’s “Big Dig” tunnels...

Niccolo Paganini - 24 Caprices Op.1 24 Cprices Op.1 for Solo Violin Itzhak Perlman - Violin 1st= (00:00) 2nd= (01:38) 3rd= (04:21) 4th= (07:16) 5th= (13:39) 6th= (16:06) 7th= (19:35) 8th= (23:28) 9th= (26:06) 10th= (28:38) 11th= (31:03) 12th= (34:30) 13th= (37:18) 14th= (39:50) 15th= (41:53) 16th= (44:24) 17th= (45:51) 18th= (49:02) 19th= (51:27) 20th= (54:14) 21st= (57:52) 22nd= (1:00:48) 23rd= (1:03:16) 24th= (1:07:59)