MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi now being blacklisted

16.11.2023 admin

According to a Chinese blogger, three publishers (not journals!) are now being blacklisted

On January 3rd, Zhejiang Gonggong University, a public university in Hangzhou, announced that all the journals of the three largest Open Access (OA) publishing houses were blacklisted, including Hindawi (acquired by Wiley in early 2021), MDPI founded by a Chinese businessman Lin Shukun, and Frontiers, which has become very popular in recent years. The university issued a notice stating that articles published by Hindawi, MDPI and Frontiers will not be included in research performance statistics.

Allergy

Die Asthma-Kinderheilstätte Bad Reichenhall

15.11.2023 admin

Von den Ereignissen in der 1986 geschlossenen Asthma-Kinderheilstätte in Bad Reichenhall höre ich heute morgen zum ersten Mal in einem Podcast von BR24. Der Missbrauch geht dabei weit über die unsäglichen Verschickungsheime der 50er und 60er Jahre hinaus, die für Ihre Erziehungsmethoden berüchtigt waren. Continue reading Die Asthma-Kinderheilstätte Bad Reichenhall →

Philosophy

The self evident?

14.11.2023 admin

The Wikipedia summarizes the “Leviathan and the air pump” book by Schaffer & Shapin

Their aim is to use a historical account of the debate over the validity of Boyle’s air pump experiments, and by extension his experimental method, to discover the origins of the credibility that we give experimentally produced facts today. The authors wish to avoid ‘The self-evident’ method, which (they explain) is when historians project the values of their current culture onto the time period that they are studying (in this case valuing the benefits of empiricism). They wish to take a “stranger’s” viewpoint when examining the debate between Hobbes and Boyle because, in the 1660s, both methods of knowledge production were well respected in the academic community.

Joke, Software

The best demos are located at localhost:99

14.11.2023 admin

just kidding

Allergy, Philosophy, Software

The problem is getting exponentially worse

14.11.2023 admin

Last Word on Nothing writing about ChatGPT

What initiated my change of mind was playing around with some AI tools. After trying out chatGPT and Google’s AI tool, I’ve now come to the conclusion that these things are dangerous. We are living in a time when we’re bombarded with an abundance of misinformation and disinformation, and it looks like AI is about to make the problem exponentially worse by polluting our information environment with garbage. It will become increasingly difficult to determine what is true.

Is “derivate work” now equal to reality? Here is Geoff Hinton

“Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton, in recent public talks, explains that one of the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-intelligent, but that they will generate text that is super-persuasive without being intelligent, in the manner of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. In a world where evidence and logic are not respected in public debate, Hinton imagines that systems operating without evidence or logic could become our overlords by becoming superhumanly persuasive, imitating and supplanting the worst kinds of political leader.

At least in medicine there is an initiative underway where the lead author can be contacted at the address below.

In my field, the first AI consultation results look more than dangerous with one harmful response out of 20 questions.

A total of 20 questions covering various aspects of allergic rhinitis were asked. Among the answers, eight received a score of 5 (no inaccuracies), five received a score of 4 (minor non-harmful inaccuracies), six received a score of 3 (potentially misinterpretable inaccuracies) and one answer had a score of 2 (minor potentially harmful inaccuracies).

Within a few years, AI-generated content will be the microplastic of our online ecosystem (@mutinyc)

Noteworthy, Philosophy

When the empire strikes back

7.11.2023 admin

TheFrancesca Gino case is now well known [1, 2]. But this is something never seen before , a mass self-auditing effort to prove the honesty of the co-authors

More than 140 collaborators of Francesca Gino, the Harvard Business School professor who has been accused of data fabrication, have been scrambling to verify the research that they’ve published with her. On Monday, they started making their findings public.

The mass self-auditing effort, called the Many Co-Authors Project, has already initiated the retraction of at least one paper that Gino collected data for, according to one of her collaborators.

https://manycoauthors.org/gino/papers Nov 7, 2023

15 Nov 2024

At the end it is about sleeping tonight

https://x.com/jpsimmon/status/1833976010192421244

Allergy, Genetics, Joke

Did the Neanderthal hominid suffer from asthma?

4.11.2023 admin

Maybe this is a largely irrelevant question – basically as relevant as building a museum on top of some Neanderthal 1 bones – as we can never reliable predict a complex trait just by genetics and some broken bones.

Already Virchow was wrong believing that the “Neanderthaler” was a modern human suffering from senility and malformations … Anyway, new research wants to answer this question:

Here we show that of the 51 asthma-associated loci that we surveyed, 39 carry variants that were derived in the Neanderthal lineage. The shared sequences suggest that some asthma variants may have originated from the Neanderthal genome after admixture and subsequent introgression into the Eurasian population. Of note, one variant, rs4742170, previously linked to asthma and childhood wheezing, was shown in a recent study to disrupt glucocorticoid receptor binding to a putative IL33 enhancer, and elevate enhancer activity of this key asthma gene.

Sorry to say that there are now >3000 variants associated with asthma including at least 354 coding variants while the authors used only 51 loci in their study derived from an outdated 2016 review. So we could already end up writing up a review here but the paper continues with omissions and misunderstandings

most of the Neanderthal-derived SNPs we identified, including those near the lead variants for the asthma GWAS signals, are in non-coding regions of the gene

Unfortunately we need to be exact here – not just “near” some variants. The SNP rs4742170 that they showed from the EVA database had indeed the T allele in the Vindija Neanderthal

https://bioinf.eva.mpg.de/jbrowse/?loc=9%3A6242936..6242991&tracks=hg19_1000g%2Cvindija_hc_bam%2CAltai

but unfortunately when going then to dbSNP it is also found in the African genome.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/?term=rs4742170

So the whole conclusion

Our findings here … add asthma to the list of diseases that could be traced back to Neanderthals

is wrong.

Video

Archivierung

1.11.2023 admin

ein echtes Unikum der badische Archivknoten

Philosophy

Industrialized cheating

1.11.2023 admin

From a guest post at Retraction Watch by Adya Misra

Just in the last few months, we put out 37 from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and 21 from Concurrent Engineering. And there are more to come. While we don’t celebrate this type of action, the news is not all bad. The high numbers of retractions at times reflect a problem of industrialized cheating, but also, as in our case, a belief that rigorous scholarship – robustly reviewed by researchers who are experts in their fields – can and should improve the world.

Philosophy

The information landscape is pitted with lies, tall tales, myths, pseudoscience, half-truths, and plain old inaccuracies

27.10.2023 admin

Joanna Thompson summarizes it at (Undark)

It’s worth noting that misinformation — by any definition — has been around for a long time. Ever since the first humans developed language, we’ve been navigating an information landscape pitted with lies, tall tales, myths, pseudoscience, half-truths, and plain old inaccuracies. Medieval European bestiaries, for instance, described creatures like bears and weasels alongside unicorns and manticores. Anti-vaccine groups have been around for over 200 years, well before the internet. And in the age of yellow journalism around the turn of the 20th century, many reporters made up stories out of whole cloth.
“I don’t like this whole talk of ‘we’re living in a post-truth world,’ as if we ever lived in a truth world,” said Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Video

To calm down a heated world

26.10.2023 admin

Leo

Allergy, Genetics, Joke, Software

Google Scholar ranking of my co-authors is completely useless

23.10.2023 admin

The title says it already while a new r-blogger post helped tremendously to analyze my own scholar account for the first time.

I always wondered how Google Scholar ranked my 474 earlier co-authors. Continue reading Google Scholar ranking of my co-authors is completely useless →

Noteworthy

Aktivismus vs Wissenschaft

20.10.2023 admin

der Wiarda Blog schreibt

Die meisten Studierenden lehnen darüber hinaus Aktivismus in der Wissenschaft klar ab. 78 Prozent der befragten antworten, dass Wissenschaft politisch neutral sein solle – das Gegenteil sagen nur neun Prozent. 63 Prozent der Studierenden finden zugleich, dass Wissenschaft kritisch reflektieren sollte, welche politischen Auswirkungen sie hat. Gespalten sind die Befragten bei der Genderforschung: 37 Prozent sagen, sie sei “oft mehr Ideologie als Wissenschaft”, 37 Prozent lehnen eine solche Aussage ab. Allerdings: 25 Prozent sind unentschieden. Da Sozialforscher die Antwort “unentschieden” jedoch oft als bedingte Zustimmung deuten, muss die Einstellung der Studierenden gegenüber der Genderforschung wohl als überwiegend kritisch eingeschätzt werden.

Der Original Report hat auch eine Grafik dazu

Ich fühle mich von den 78% bestätigt.

Philosophy

PubPeer – the nice examples

20.10.2023 admin

Starting a collection now of really helpful advice

Noteworthy

Nochmal zur Freiheit der Wissenschaft

19.10.2023 admin

Die höchste Repräsentantin der Wissenschaft in Deutschland schreibt in der FAZ

Schon lange wollen Tierrechtsaktivisten und Gentechnikgegner Forschungsmöglichkeiten umfassend einschränken und schrecken dabei auch vor Drohungen gegen Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler und Sachbeschädigungen nicht zurück.
Die radikale Rechte möchte den Hochschulen ganze Fächer oder Vorlesungsreihen verbieten … Genau diese Botschaft senden auch linke Gruppen, die mit wissenschaftsfernen und -feindlichen Begründungen Kampagnen gegen ihnen nicht genehme Themenschwerpunkte, Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler fahren.

In der Tat, Wissenschaftsfreiheit ist bedroht, wie noch kaum zuvor.

Vgl auch die frühren Einträge zu