Uncategorized

Seoul update of the WMA declaration – you lost your rights

Having written in the last year a widely discussed paper about Informed Consent the new WMA revision #25 makes this rather waste paper:

For medical research using identifiable human material or data, physicians must normally seek consent for the collection, analysis, storage and/or reuse. There may be situations where consent would be impossible or impractical to obtain for such research or would pose a threat to the validity of the research. In such situations the research may be done only after consideration and approval of a research ethics committee.

With this paragraph in effect you can now to do every test on every sample that you possess. I will tell you from my practical experience how this work Continue reading Seoul update of the WMA declaration – you lost your rights →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026
Allergy, Vitamins

Three unwise monkeys

Thanks to the great audience in Washington DC watching our pro-con show about vitamin D and allergy. Are you still wondering about all the monkeys on my opponent’s slides? Me too…
With having fever from a flu on the way back to Europe, a picture came to my mind showing the 3 apes that are unable to see, hear and speak …
Mail me if there remain any doubts about the Th1 blocking effect of D3 or go to one of the recent reviews – I have take this for granted as it is even in standard textbooks like Roitt’s Immunology. Continue reading Three unwise monkeys →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026
Allergy, Joke, Software

Clickstreams

An American team believes to describe science activity by web clicks on journal pages.

Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia.

with the conclusion Continue reading Clickstreams →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026
Genetics, Philosophy, Software

A better search engine for science?

New rumors say about Wolfram alpha

In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn’t understand the question or the answer, and doesn’t compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.
…
or those who are more scientifically inclined, Stephen showed me many interesting examples — for example, Wolfram Alpha was able to solve novel numeric sequencing problems, calculus problems, and could answer questions about the human genome too.

I have applied for a test account as I am interested in methods how to deal with genomic and all the other pentabyte of data — we urgently need a paradigm shift as single genome prices will go down to 1000 €. Continue reading A better search engine for science? →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026
Allergy, Genetics, Software

So many advertisers

It’s a pleasant experience to write something that is being translated afterwards into so many languages afterwards. It is, however, irritating that this dissemination is irrespective of what I (and all second and third hand journalists and translators) understand of this curious world.

screenshot1-4

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026
Joke, Philosophy

Is the Nobel prize predictable?

To be a Nobel candidate may be predictable if I am reading correctly a paper on archiv.org. The “traditional” impact factor is largely useless

as it ignores the importance of citing papers: a citation from an obscure paper is given the same weight as a citation from a ground-breaking and highly cited work

It may be, however, that the (PageRank derived) CiteRank is holding some promises – giving weight by whom you are cited. In this case, even a 100 citation paper can lead to a Nobel prize.
But is it predictable to get a Nobel prize candidate? Certainly not. I agree with a news feature about a science manager who

recently read Outliers, a book in which Malcolm Gladwell makes the case that
exceptional people get where they are partly because of the exceptional circumstances in which they find themselves, rather than through exceptional ability or sheer hard work.

Yea, yea.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026
Philosophy

Peer review – a charade?

quoting from an email this afternoon:

Only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that “peer review works well as it is.” (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192).
“A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research.” (Horrobin, 2001).
Horrobin concludes that peer review “is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance.” (Horrobin, 2001). Continue reading Peer review – a charade? →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026
Uncategorized

John Snow, cure of cholera and foundation of epidemiology

The non-epidemiologist will find the story about John Snow, cholera, and the removed pump handle at Wikipedia or at the UCLA site.
During my visit last week in London, Broadwick (former Broad) Street was under reconstruction – just in line with the old maps of waste water drainage.
dsc_3265 Continue reading John Snow, cure of cholera and foundation of epidemiology →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026
Genetics, Philosophy

Darwin and successors

1859 edition of the Origins of Species
Here is a picture the original 1859 edition of the “Origins” while I still wonder if this book is about the origins or about the transitions of species.
That may be understandable as I am currently reading David Berlinski’s 2008 book “The Devil’s Delusion”. His (English) Wikipedia entry is not Continue reading Darwin and successors →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 29.08.2026