Erosion in trust of science

Method: Co-branded (Elsevier and Sense About Science) online survey in English, 15 minutes to complete. Fieldwork took place in May 2019 while the results are now at the Elsevier site.
Result: 3,133 researchers responded to a survey of 98,160 individuals selected from database of 3.6 million researchers (3.2 % response rate).

37% of researchers do not trust anymore in published research.

 

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Postdoc me now

 

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Vitamin D polygenic risk score is not associated with any disease

It is one of the minor papers in a minor journal but nevertheless has some big impact: “A phenome-wide Mendelian-randomization study of genetically determined vitamin D on multiple health outcomes using the UK Biobank” in Int J Epidemiol. 2019 Sep 13

Existing studies suggest that a low vitamin D level is associated with more than 130 outcomes. … We then implemented a Mendelian Randomization-Phenome Wide Association Study (MR-PheWAS) analysis on data from 339 256 individuals of White British origin from UK Biobank. We first ran a PheWAS analysis to test the associations between a 25(OH)D polygenic risk score and 920 disease outcomes…The PheWAS analysis did not identify any health outcome associated with the 25(OH)D polygenic risk score.

The message is clear – we know it for years.

 

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Vitamin D Warnhinweis

Das Deutsche Ärzteblatt hat einen Warnhinweis “Fachgesellschaften warnen vor unkritischem Umgang mit Nahrungs­ergänzungsmitteln” allem Internet Hype zum Trotz

“Die Werbeaussage, wonach jeder Mensch eine Extraportion Vitamine oder Mineralstoffe zur Aufrechterhaltung der Leistungsfähigkeit und Gesundheit braucht, ist schlicht und einfach falsch", sagte Jürgen Schölmerich, Facharzt für Gastroenterologie und ehemaliger ärztlicher Direktor und Vorstandsvorsitzender des Universitätsklinikums Frankfurt am Main. Nur für wenige Personengruppen, etwa Schwangere oder Veganer, seien bestimmte Nahrungsergänzungsmittel-Präparate tatsächlich empfohlen.

 

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Why do we have so much atopic dermatitis?

I think it is quite reasonable that childhood skin care practices is involved in the increase in atopic dermatis (AD) according to a recent review.

Kelleher and colleagues found skin barrier dysfunction precedes AD development. Thus, soaps and detergents may aggravate preexisting tendencies to skin barrier dysfunction and promote skin inflammation and initiate AD in susceptible individuals. Whether skin care practices have changed over time to explain the increase in AD incidence remains unknown, but high bathing frequency and the use of fragranced lotions are commonplace in US children, two practices potentially harmful to the skin barrier. Protecting the skin barrier early in life with emollients appears to reduce the risk of AD development.

 

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A sentiment analysis of the most recent @realDonaldTrump tweets

There had been a repeated assessments of psychiatrists during the presidentship of Donald Trump (“The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President – Updated and Expanded with New Essays“).

I am now analyzing here the 3.200 most recent tweets using a computational pipeline created already some years ago using the following packages

# -- based on https://www.r-bloggers.com/analyzing-the-us-election-using-twitter-and-meta-data-in-r and http://juliasilge.com/blog/Joy-to-the-World/
list.of.packages <- c("twitteR","ggplot2","httr","rjson","tm","gridExtra","lubridate","wordcloud","devtools","syuzhet","SnowballC","scales","reshape2","dplyr","stringr")
lapply(list.of.packages, require, character.only = TRUE)

The choice of words isn’t unexpected – just what is already known – with “great”, “president”, “will” and “trump” being the most frequently used words.

wordcloud

All tweets can be classified by sentiment scores of the words used. If we look at the total counts, three categories are being used excessively: “positive”, “negative” and “trust”.

sentiment scores

Trust seems to be used not so much in the context of personal relationship but in the context of economics of “deal”. As it has been speculated that he suffers of cyclothymia ( 0.4% to 1% of the U.S. population has cyclothymia) we can look also the time course of sentiments.

time series on a daily basis
time series using 3 day intervals
time series weekly basis

Variation (dispersion) is high, in particular on a daily basis, while in the absence of any normal values it is difficult to make any definite conclusions. Positive and negative emotions are not always in parallel, there are “converging situations” nearly every month where negative emotions go up and positive emotions go down indicating a more profound mood swing.

The correlation plot shows the expected decline of negative scores with increasing positive scores. Many values are outside of the 95% confidence bounds, making the sentiment score (and even the personality) largely unpredictable.

correlation plot

An extended analysis including more reference accounts would be necessary for further conclusion. Nevertheless, there is evidence of mental instability as noticed already by various expert testimonials.

There is first the emergency situation his mental instability poses as a result of the power that he holds and the weapons he has at his disposal…There is first the emergency situation his mental instability poses as a result of the power that he holds and the weapons he has at his disposal. But there are also the effects on public health through his fomenting of violence. Hate crimes have seen unprecedented spikes, bullying is widespread, and white supremacist killings have doubled. There are also statistics on the rise of stress levels that are nationally worse than during World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and September 11 terrorist attacks. He is also destabilizing the global scene by alienating allies, emboldening dictators, reigniting nuclear proliferation, and launching a trade war in ways that are predictable from his mental impairments. These are not just matters of policy but arise out of a troubled relationship with reality, a propensity to attack if questioned or even slightly criticized, and dangerous behavioral patterns that need to be spoken about.

There is not so much to add to man who believes in his “great and unmatched wisdom". Frank Zappa once said “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry”.

 

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Research Integrity

The NIH director has some useful comments this morning how to promote a culture of research integrity adding to the available body of evidence.

Institutional and government policies that might enhance integrity and excellence: Among a variety of possibilities, I talk about the promising roles of electronic laboratory notebooks and of policies to promote data sharing.

While I agree with many of this thoughts, I do not believe that the permanent mantra for excellence will increase research integrity. Even worse, if you demand extraordinary work, you will get extraordinary work irrespective of what happened in the lab.

 

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An irreversible experiment

Transgenic Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes Transfer Genes into a Natural Population. Scientific Reportsvolume 9, Article number: 13047 (2019).

In an attempt to control the mosquito-borne diseases yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika fevers, a strain of transgenically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes containing a dominant lethal gene has been developed by a commercial company, Oxitec Ltd. …. Evidently, rare viable hybrid offspring between the release strain and the Jacobina population are sufficiently robust to be able to reproduce in nature. The release strain was developed using a strain originally from Cuba, then outcrossed to a Mexican population. Thus, Jacobina Ae. aegypti are now a mix of three populations. It is unclear how this may affect disease transmission or affect other efforts to control these dangerous vectors.

 

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Endlich keine Straffreiheit mehr bei Wissenschaftsbetrug

Diskutiert wird es schon lange: Soll Wissenschaftsbetrug weiterhin straffrei bleiben?

Friedhelm Hermann, einer der grössten Fälscher der jüngeren Geschichte, kam mit einer lächerlich kleinen Auflage aus dem Verfahren und konnte viele Jahre unbehelligt in einer Praxis hinter dem Marienplatz in München praktizieren.
Das scheint sich nun aber zu ändern. Das DÄ berichtet

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will härter gegen Plagiate in wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten vorgehen. Die Hochschulen sollen künftig Bußgelder in Höhe von bis zu 10.000 Euro verhängen können, wenn sie eine Verletzung der wissenschaftlichen Redlichkeit auf­d­ecken. Das steht im Gesetzentwurf der Landesregierung zur Änderung des Hoch­schul­rechts, der heute in einer öffentlichen Expertenanhörung erörtert wurde. Weitere geplante Änderungen betreffen die Hochschulentwicklungsplanung und das Promotions­recht.

Ohne dem “irrational gesteigerten Strafbedürfnis der Öffentlichkeit” (Fischer) zu verfallen – das ist eine überfällige Massnahme in Anbetracht des Schadens der dadurch angerichtet wird – von sinnlosen Replikationstudien bis hin zum Verlust an Menschenleben.

 

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Ein bundesweiter Konflikt?

Wissenschaft ist immer weniger frei in Wahl von Themen und Methoden – daher auch das jüngste Abschlussmemorandum der Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen. Die Unzufriedenheit zeigt sich nun auch im Aufbegehren von Hochschullehrern in Göttingen (SZ von heute)

Eine Gruppe Professoren rebelliert gegen die Wahl des neuen Uni-Chefs – und meint eigentlich die moderne Hochschulkultur. … Thomas Kaufmann hat sich gerade erst hingesetzt, da bricht es aus ihm heraus. “Es geht um unser Ethos als Hochschullehrer”, ruft der Kirchenhistoriker. “Unser Beruf genoss einmal großes Ansehen. Wir müssen uns den Respekt zurückholen. Vor allem aber unsere Selbstachtung.” … “Wir begehren gegen ein System auf, das uns Professoren zu Empfängern von Managementvorgaben macht”, sagt Kaufmann. Über Zielvereinbarungen etwa, mit denen Professoren versprechen müssten, eine bestimmte Menge an Fördergeldern einzuwerben. “Das sind für mich Prostituierungsphänomene der Wissenschaft!”

 

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