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Handout text 2011 AAAAI Seminar San Francisco Vitamin D deficiency

2011 AAAAI Annual Meeting Handout

Session Number: 3523
Session Title: Vitamin D: Vitamin D Deficiency Causes Asthma -> CON
Session Start: 3/20/2011 12:45 AM
Matthias Wjst, Munich

Welcome to the third major symposium on vitamin D and asthma at the AAAAI. Continue reading Handout text 2011 AAAAI Seminar San Francisco Vitamin D deficiency

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.03.2026

Plagiarism or sloppy citation?

We have an interesting discussion here in Germany, how many sloppy citations are being allowed in a dissertation. Does plagiarism only start with central text passages? We all have signed a form like

Ich versichere, dass ich die Arbeit ohne fremde Hilfe und ohne Benutzung anderer als der angegebenen Quellen angefertigt habe und dass die Arbeit in gleicher oder ähnlicher Form noch keiner anderen Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegen hat und von dieser als Teil einer Prüfungsleistung angenommen wurde. Alle Ausführungen, die wörtlich oder sinngemäß übernommen wurden, sind als solche gekennzeichnet.

which is rather clear: “I used only the cited references and nothing else.” Continue reading Plagiarism or sloppy citation?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.03.2026

Science crowd funded?

I already wrote an earlier essay about science as crowd source enterprise. Funding initiatives and funding selection of scientific projects, however, have never been transparent to me (even with all the EU announcements and lobbying before setting out the large framework programmes).
Reading now at david-campbell.orgabout a photo project in Afghanistan Continue reading Science crowd funded?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.03.2026

Placebo works even if you know it’s a placebo

Some fascinating new paper at PLoS ONE

Placebo treatment can significantly influence subjective symptoms. However, it is widely believed that response to placebo requires concealment or deception […] Placebos administered without deception may be an effective treatment for [irritable bowel symptoms]

I have no idea, how this is working…

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.03.2026

We are not suggesting that peer review is infallible

Nature medicine recently acknowledged our work as science bloggers by admitting

We are not suggesting, however, that peer review is infallible. Nonetheless, as editors, we hope that anyone accepting an invitation to review a manuscript considers that commitment as being of comparable importance to the other responsibilities of a busy researcher. And although we know that more pressing issues can take precedence over reviewing a manuscript, we still expect that the same level of integrity and objective, critical analysis will be applied to the assessment of the manuscript under review as is applied to the referee’s own work.

In German we say “blauäugig” which translates to “wonderful naive”. There are so many examples of non-integrity and non-objectivity of published research where the peer review failed to a large extent – many examples here and at other sites like retractionwatch or badscience. All these papers by Friedhelm Herrmann, Marion Brach and Roland Mertelsmann with the most recent examples by Carsten Carlberg (“It’s all her fault, and probably today is the worst day of her life when the world sees what she has done”“) and Silvia Bulfone Paus (“it was Elena and Vadim and the journal editors should have caught us“)

With the pervasiveness of the Internet, and the speed of communication it permits, commentary and criticism of research findings can occur almost immediately after their online publi­ cation. This medium should be actively embraced by the research community as a dynamic forum.

There is not even a trackback possibility for that Nature medicine editorial – the whole blogger’s laudatio thing reeks of hypocrisy.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.03.2026

Connect me


The new connectome website has some unusual (artistic) brain pictures that look so much “outward bound”. Although the neuronal direction is well-known for decades, the pictures there are so impressive that I moving that blog entry even in the Science + Theology section, yea, yea.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.03.2026

Mac wallpaper with notifications

Do you want to know what the large figures on my desktop mean? These are the counts of important emails (with sender in my addressbook), all other unread emails as well as unread RSS feeds.

It turned out to be a bit tricky what to enter into the Geektool shell window – here is my solution:

|wj_geektool.sh|

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.03.2026