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Noteworthy

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo

Das Gute, das Schlechte und das Hässliche.

Es ist kein guter Tag für Wissenschaft, weder in den USA wo wieder gewählt wurde aber auch nicht in Deutschland, in dem nun die Regierung zerbrochen ist.

Dabei – so das Ärzteblatt diese Woche – sagt doch das neue Wissenschaftsbarometer wie wichtig Wissenschaft ist

… Umgekehrt schätzt beinahe jeder zweite Befragte den Einfluss der Wissenschaft auf die Politik als eher zu ge­ring/viel zu gering ein. Das geht aus dem heute veröffentlichten Wissenschaftsbarometer 2024 hervor.
Die Frage, wie es hierzulande um die Wissenschaftsfreiheit steht, beantworteten 39 Prozent der Befragten mit „teils, teils“. Rund ein Drittel (32 Prozent) hält sie für „eher gut“, „sehr gut“ sagten 13 Prozent.
Bei Personen mit hohem formalem Bildungsniveau ist das Vertrauen deutlich ausgeprägter (75 Prozent) als bei mittlerem und niedrigem formalem Bildungsniveau. Der Grund, dem die Befragten am häufigsten als Grund für ihr Misstrauen zustimmten, war die Aussage: „Weil Wissenschaftler stark abhängig von ihren Geldgebern sind.“

Und wo ist nun das Gute an allem?

Die Wissenschaftsministerin wird nun endlich zurücktreten nachdem sie wie kaum jemand vor ihr im BMBF die Scheiben zerschlagen hat. SZ:

Die FDP zieht ihre Minister aus der Bundesregierung zurück. Sie wollten ihren Rücktritt geschlossen beim Bundespräsidenten einreichen, sagte Fraktionschef Christian Dürr. Das Dreierbündnis ist damit zu Ende. Im Kabinett saßen für die Liberalen vier Minister – neben Christian Lindner (Finanzen) noch Volker Wissing (Verkehr), Marco Buschmann (Justiz) und Bettina Stark-Watzinger (Bildung und Forschung).

Während Wissing sich mit seinem FDP Austritt allgemeinen Respekt erworben hat, ist die Bilanz von Stark-Watzinger verheerend. Jan-Martin Wiarda schreibt

So schnell kann es gehen mit dem Rücktritt einer Ministerin, den sie eben noch in der Fördermittelaffäre so vehement abgelehnt hatte… Alles zu Ende, alles vorbei? Stillstand in der deutschen Wissenschaftslandschaft bis zur Konstituierung einer neuen Regierung, wohl frühestens im Sommer nächsten Jahres? Kein Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (WissZeitVG). Kein Forschungsdatengesetz. Keine DATI [Deutschen Agentur für Transfer und Innovation]? Keine Novelle des Aufstiegsfortbildungsförderungsgesetzes. Kein Digitalpakt für die Schulen.

20.11.2024

Wie es weiter geht? Wir wissen es nicht.

3.12.2024

Stark-Watzinger ist endlich zurück getreten.

Bettina Stark-Watzinger durfte die große politische Bühne über den Nebenausgang verlassen. Am Mittwochabend, kurz nach dem Koalitionsbruch, teilte sie ihren Rücktritt mit, der in der Wissenschaft zuvor schon tausendfach gefordert worden war. … Das Vertrauen der Wissenschaft in die Ministerin war spätestens nach der Fördergeldaffäre irreparabel beschädigt. Man wartete auf den Nachfolger.

Aber was ist nun mit den Wire Daten? Ich tendiere zur

dritten Möglichkeit, die Bundesregierung hat von diesen Chats keine Kenntnis, weil sie gar nicht auf “Wire Bund”, sondern auf der privaten Wire-App stattfanden. Was in dem Augenblick ein Verstoß gegen die Vorschriften wäre, wo, und seien es nur zum Teil, doch dienstliche Belange und Zwecke diskutiert worden sein sollten.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Philosophy

Fake degrees from fake universities

Unfortunately there are so many lies, there is so much fraud in science. And science is a big business according to a new report

According to Hesselbäck, in Sweden it’s not illegal for a job applicant to submit qualifications from a fake university, although it is a crime to forge an academic transcript or degree from a legitimate university. The relevant laws vary by country.

Occasionally I had doubts on MD/PhD or professoral titles shown on badges while it is particular annoying if legal and illegal titles are even mixing…

In Norway, he adds, it is a criminal offence to submit credentials from a fake university, but the burden of proof has to be strong. At the federal level, the United States does not explicitly prohibit the issuing, holding or advertising of bogus degrees, although some states have laws banning them. In practice, individual holders of phoney medical degrees have surrendered their licences or been removed from their positions.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Philosophy

elife delisted

Elife is one of the most interesting scientific journals with a full history at Wikipedia.  The Elife board  introduced  in 2022 that

From next year, eLife is eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review, instead focusing on public reviews and assessments of preprint

with the unfortunate but foreseeable consequence that Elife now does not get anymore an impact factor

Clarivate, the provider of the Web of Science platform, said it would not provide impact factors to journals that publish papers not recommended for publication by reviewers.

I don’t care about impact factors. I also do not care about Clarivate or any other Private-Equity-company as we don’t need this kind of business in science. Elife however will loose it’s value in particular as system still has some flaws.

DeevyBee commented already about them a year ago

there is a fatal flaw in the new model, which is that it still relies on editors to decide which papers go forward to review, using a method that will do nothing to reduce the tendency to hype and the consequent publication bias that ensues. I blogged about this a year ago, and suggested a simple solution, which is for the editors to adopt ‘results-blind’ review when triaging papers. This is an idea that has been around at least since 1976 (Mahoney, 1976) which has had a resurgence in popularity in recent years, with growing awareness of the dangers of publication bias (Locasio, 2017). The idea is that editorial decisions should be made based on whether the authors had identified an interesting question and whether their methods were adequate to give a definitive answer to that question.

So the idea is that the editors get the title and a modified abstract with no author names and without results.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Noteworthy, Software, Tech

More AI headlines

-1-

While we are still waiting for the Nobel prize speech of Geoffrey Hinton in December, AI makes even more negative headlines.

[Hinton] “I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control.” He also said he uses the AI chatbot ChatGPT4 for many things now but with the knowledge that it does not always get the answer right.

 

-2-

The sheer power consumption of running AI models is frightening. Nature News asks if AI’s huge energy demands will spur a nuclear renaissance

Google announced that it will buy electricity made with reactors developed by Kairos Power, based in Alameda, California. Meanwhile, Amazon is investing approximately US$500 million in the X-Energy Reactor Company, based in Rockville, Maryland, and has agreed to buy power produced by X-energy-designed reactors due to be built in Washington State.

 

-3-

A former OpenAI employee talks on his blog how AI is using copyrighted material eg stealing content.

While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data. If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as “fair use”. Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use. Instead, I’ll provide a specific analysis for ChatGPT’s use of its training data, but the same basic template will also apply for many other generative AI products.

Effects can be measured only indirectly for example by the visitor count at Stack Overflow where the traffic declined as many user (including me) don’t need Stack Overflow anymore.
Here is another phantastic discussion over at PP between Henry Leirvoll and 495yt on the very basic questions of copyright.

humans get inspired (parsing the external examples or experiences through their inner understanding and individual perspective) they start working to make something with their tools, skills, time and purpose. the result represents the author, their influences and their message.
a lot of this process is protected by copyright.
ai is not inspired. and it has no personal perspective or tools. no message to transmit.
any message put into prompts by an ai user is translated by it’s LLM layer into other, more complex prompts, which also get treated quasi-randomly by the weights and biases of the model, as well as rand seeds.

 

-4-

And well, ChatGPT can produce malicious code even with all precautions: Researchers Bypass AI Safeguards Using Hexadecimal Encoding and Emojis

If a user instructs the chatbot to write an exploit for a specified CVE, they are informed that the request violates usage policies. However, if the request was encoded in hexadecimal format, the guardrails were bypassed and ChatGPT not only wrote the exploit, but also attempted to execute it “against itself”, according to Figueroa.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Noteworthy

Alternatives to Google Scholar

Kirsten Elliott has an interesting blog post

There are alternatives to Google Scholar which operate from an open research ethos and are free to use. Three prominent alternatives are The Lens, Matilda and OpenAlex. The one I’ve used most is OpenAlex. One study has found it to have comparable coverage to Web of Science and Scopus, and my own limited testing found significantly more publications indexed from social sciences and humanities subjects. Their code is fully open, and the data is reusable.

not as good as Google but usable

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Noteworthy

COVID-19 Mortalität IX: Doppelt so hohe Krankenhausmortalität in Deutschland als in der Schweiz

Ich hatte in einer eigenen Studie vermutet, daß die viel höhere Beatmungsrate von Stefan Kluge in Hamburg zu einer doppelt so hohen Mortalität führte.

Nun kommt eine unabhängige Studie im Vergleich zwischen Deutschland und der Schweiz zu einem nahezu identischen Ergebnis.

The in-hospital mortality was significantly higher in Germany than in Switzerland (21% vs. 12%, OR 2.0, 95% CI 1.9–2.0, p < .001). Matched cohorts showed reduced differences, but Germany still exhibited higher in-hospital mortality. Discrepancies were evident in both pre-pandemic and pandemic analyses, highlighting existing disparities between both countries […]  The fact that a higher pre-pandemic in-hospital mortality rate was observed in Germany with a comparable mechanical-ventilation rate suggests that there might be reasons other than the pandemic.

Ursache ist natürlich die Indikation zur Beatmung. Und das obwohl wir es schon ziemlich früh in der Pandemie besser wussten dank  Thomas Voshaar in Moers, siehe auch

COVID-19 Mortalität VIII: Hamburg reloaded

COVID-19 Mortalität VII: ICUs in Deutschland

COVID-19 Mortalität VI: Was hat sich an der S3 Leitlinie geändert?

COVID-19 Mortalität V: Vergleich Schweiz/Österreich

COVID-19 Mortalität IV: Wie wir sie senken könnten

COVID19 Mortalität III: Wie gut ist die Leitlinie zur Beatmung?

COVID-19 Mortalität II: Hamburg und München im Vergleich

COVID-19 Mortalität I: Wieso ist die Mortalität In Deutschland so unterschiedlich?

Christian Karagiannidis in seiner letzten Publikation vermeidet wohlweislich meinen Ortsvergleich, kommt am Ende aber nicht umhin, die Übertherapie aus wirtschaftlichen Gründen zu kritisieren – reichlich verklausuliert – daß nämlich eine neue „Indikationsqualität zur Aufnahme auf die Intensivstation“ notwendig ist.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Philosophy

Scientific integrity is now included in the Helsinki Declaration

JAMA has a new revision of the Helsinki Declaration. Compared to the 2013 version there is now a new chapter on scientific integrity

Scientific integrity is essential in the conduct of medical research involving human participants. Involved individuals, teams, and organizations must never engage in research misconduct.

Additional details can be found in an Editor’s note and my comments are at Retraction Watch.

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Joke, Philosophy

Comparatively trivial

Nature has a short report about historical peer reviews including a link to the Referee Report of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin about the 1954 Watson & Crick complementary paper (not the 1953 Watson & Crick double helix paper).

https://makingscience.royalsociety.org/items/rr_79_230/referees-report-by-dorothy-mary-crowfoot-hodgkin-on-a-paper-the-complementary-structure-of-deoxyribonucleic-acid-by-francis-harry-compton-crick-and-james-dewey-watson?page=1

And here is Fig 5 and Fig 6 of the paper under review. So did Watson & Crick follow her advice?

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1954.0101

I don’t think so.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Genetics, Philosophy

Risks you should be aware of as study participant

I wrote about this about this basically 15 years ago

Confidentiality has been seen in the past as a fundamental ethical principle in health care and breaching confidentiality is usually a reason for disciplinary action. It has been assigned such a great value because it directly originates from the patient’s autonomy to control his or her own life […] Two types of re-identification are possible: the “Netflix” type and the “profiling” type.

There is a new Cell paper that builds a “profiling” attack using even single-cell gene expression data only

we demonstrate that individuals in single-cell gene expression datasets are vulnerable to linking attacks, where attackers can infer their sensitive phenotypic information using publicly available tissue or cell-type-specific expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) information.

So this should be included in informed consent forms also.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Noteworthy

Fellow Scientist: You must correct the record

Many PubPeer records highlight papers that are never corrected. Unfortunately there are many authors who never respond to comments in the hope that everything will be forgotten a few days later. Also Stanford’s Tessier-Lavigne hoped that time will let the dust settle while the Kirkland & Ellis Report by July 17,2023 clearly states

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/statement-stanford-board-chair-jerry-yang

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Theology

Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism

After a recent discussion here I followed up the empirical data that are published in “Fundamentalismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit Muslime und Christen im europäischen Vergleich“.

 Almost half of European Muslims agree that there is only one interpretation of the Koran, that Muslims should return to the roots of Islam, and that religious rules are more important than secular laws. Based on these items, a WZB study shows that religious fundamentalism is much more common among Muslims than among Christians. This is alarming in the light of the strong link between religious fundamentalism and outgroup hostility.

Legend of the WZB results from left to “return to the roots”, “only one binding interpretation”, “religious rules more important than secular law”, “agree to all”

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025