All posts by admin

Allergy, Philosophy

Eine Fußnote zu Fußnoten

https://twitter.com/hekabeohnename/status/1559795108400201728

Schön jedenfalls die vielen juristischen und historischen Einordnungen in diesem Twitter Thread. Es fehlt dabei nur Grafton

Die Fußnote, besonders die deutsche, wird oft für den Inbegriff langweiliger Wissenschaft, für einen Geheim-Code trockener akademischer Gelehrsamkeit gehalten. Doch das heißt, sie als Tummelplatz der Leidenschaften, als Schlachtfeld intellektueller Kämpfe zu verkennen. Anthony Grafton ist es unter Einsatz von zahlreichen Fußnoten gelungen, neues Licht auf ihr Schattendasein zu werfen und ihre dramatische Bandbreite darzulegen.

und die FAZ Fußnote zu Grafton

Geisteswissenschaftler lächeln gerne über den vermeintlich naiven Objektivismus der Naturwissenschaftler. Dabei ist die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft der geisteswissenschaftlichen Konkurrenz in der Kritik der wissenschaftlichen Denkformen weit voraus. Thomas Kuhn regte Chemiker und Physiker an, nach der Geschichte von Versuchsanordnungen und Beweisverfahren zu fragen.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Software

Death by AI

spiegel.de reports a fatal accident of a self driving car.

In Kurve auf Gegenfahrbahn geraten
Ein Toter und neun Schwerverletzte bei Unfall mit Testfahrzeug
Vier Rettungshubschrauber und 80 Feuerwehrleute waren im Einsatz: Bei einem Unfall auf der B28 im Kreis Reutlingen starb ein junger Mann, mehrere Menschen kamen schwer verletzt ins Krankenhaus.

Is there any registry of these kind of accidents?

https://twitter.com/ISusmelj/status/1558912252119482368

and the discussion on responsibility

The first serious accident involving a self-driving car in Australia occurred in March this year. A pedestrian suffered life-threatening injuries when hit by a Tesla Model 3, which the driver claims was in "autopilot" mode.
In the US, the highway safety regulator is investigating a series of accidents where Teslas on autopilot crashed into first-responder vehicles with flashing lights during traffic stops.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Noteworthy

Verlust der Glaubwürdigkeit

Der Verlust der Glaubwürdigkeit ist das Schlimmste was einem einzelnen Wissenschaftler aber auch einer Kommission passieren kann. Das passierte der COVID19 Sachverständigenkommission (als Drosten ging und Stöhr kam). Leider passiert das auch bei der Stiko mit Mertens et al.

Leider hat das jetzt fatale Folgen, so die ersten Berichte aus der Praxis. Impfungen werden nun generell schwieriger, nicht nur bei “COVID22” sondern bei ALLEN Impfungen, obwohl deren Nutzen-Risiken-Relation unverändert ist.

https://twitter.com/KinderdocNina/status/1558207802564296707

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Allergy

Hygiene hypothesis hyperbole

Having written about the hygiene hypothesis, I missed a PNAS News feature even some years ago.

Again: The hygiene hypothesis was not born by David Strachan and well, there are more cracks of the hygiene hypothesis.

"The trouble is, as soon as you use the words 'hygiene hypothesis,' the word hygiene prejudges what the cause is," says Bloomfield. To the public, "hygiene" is interpreted as personal cleanliness: washing hands, keeping food clean and fresh, sanitizing the home. However, because the hypothesis has been largely uncoupled from infections, the idea that we need to be less hygienic is wrong. Relaxing hygiene standards would not reverse the trend but only serve to increase the risks of infectious disease, says Bloomfield. The term "hygiene hypothesis" also fails to incorporate all of the other factors now linked to the increase in immunoregulatory diseases.

I expect that five years after mandating “super hygiene” during COVID-19 we can finally bury the hygiene hypothesis.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Philosophy, Software

Big Data Paradox: quality beats quantity

/www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04198-4 (via @emollick)

Surveys are a crucial tool for understanding public opinion and behaviour, and their accuracy depends on maintaining statistical representativeness of their target populations by minimizing biases from all sources. Increasing data size shrinks confidence intervals but magnifies the effect of survey bias: an instance of the Big Data Paradox … We show how a survey of 250,000 respondents can produce an estimate of the population mean that is no more accurate than an estimate from a simple random sample of size 10

It basically confirms my earlier observation in asthma genetics

this result was possible with just 415 individuals instead of 500,000 individuals nowadays

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Philosophy, Software

It is only Monday but already depressing

Comment on the Palm paper by u/Flaky_Suit_8665 via @hardmaru

67 authors, 83 pages, 5408 parameters in a model, the internals of which no one can say they comprehend with a straight face, 6144 TPUs in a commercial lab that no one has access to, on a rig that no one can afford, trained on a volume of data that a human couldn't process in a lifetime, 1 page on ethics with the same ideas that have been rehashed over and over elsewhere with no attempt at a solution - bias, racism, malicious use, etc. - for purposes that who asked for?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
One World

Climate endgame?

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic.

s.C.J.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01426-1

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Philosophy

I would also like to apply for the Elsevier bug bounty program

a new proposal by Ivan Oransky

Retractions must be supported as an essential part of healthy science. Sleuths should be compensated and given access to tools to improve the hunt for errors and fraud - not face ridicule, harassment and legal action. Publishers could create a cash pool to pay them, similar to the 'bug bounties' that reward hackers who detect flaws in computer security systems. At the same time, institutions should appropriately assess researchers who honestly aim to correct the record. Retractions should not be career killers - those correcting honest errors should be celebrated.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Philosophy, Software

(replication crisis)^2

We always laughed at the papers in the “Journal of Irreproducible Results”

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-best-of-the-journal-of-irreproducible-results/473440/item/276126/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3NnCm72l-QIVpHNvBB1nIwSWEAQYAiABEgK6__D_BwE#idiq=276126&edition=1874246

 

then we had the replication crisis and nobody laughed anymore.

 

And today? It seems that irreproducible research is set to reach a new height. Elizabeth Gibney discusses an arXiv paper by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan basically saying that

reviewers do not have the time to scrutinize these models, so academia currently lacks mechanisms to root out irreproducible papers, he says. Kapoor and his co-author Arvind Narayanan created guidelines for scientists to avoid such pitfalls, including an explicit checklist to submit with each paper … The failures are not the fault of any individual researcher, he adds. Instead, a combination of hype around AI and inadequate checks and balances is to blame.

Algorithms being stuck on shortcuts that don't always hold has been discussed here earlier . Also data leakage (good old confounding) due to proxy variables seems to be also a common issue.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Allergy, Genetics

JACI – retractions overdue

JACI is the journal with the poorest experience that I ever encountered as an author and as a reviewer. The editors never adequately responded to numerous errors in an earlier paper where I sent a long letter describing all details.

And it is a nightmare – even now with more than 100 corrigenda in this journal – as the editorial office even modified correctly submitted images. Yes, the JACI editor published also falsified data.

Only recently I also found another strange retraction note

The Publisher regrets that this article is an accidental duplication of an article that has already been published in J Allergy Clin Immunol

while the link of this retraction note goes to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24892183 which is, however, a different paper.

It seem that the journal already lost the overview…

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026