All posts by admin

Allergy

Parental allergy history at farms

A recent paper on the bias of farming studies missed the healthy worker effect although this is being the most likely explanation.

So let’s have a more detailed look at farm parents. It can be drilled down to the question if parents are also “protected” or it is more likely that some affected parents just moved away.

Here are 13 studies that included information about farm parents. Continue reading Parental allergy history at farms →

 

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

Vitamin D and COVID-19

Here is the ultimate and comprehensive summary written by two of the best vitamin D experts – Martineau and Cantorna

… lack of a consistent protective signal from RCTs reporting so far is reflected by the absence of any recommendation relating to prophylactic or therapeutic use of vitamin D for COVID-19 in guidelines from national or international bodies … If vitamin D does have favourable immunomodulatory effects in COVID-19, then demonstrating a meaningful clinical benefit of supplementation over existing standards of care is likely to become increasingly challenging, as ever more effective pharmacological therapies and vaccines emerge.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Philosophy

Hausberufung

Wikipedia zu Hausberufung / internal appointment

Unter einer Hausberufung versteht man die Berufung eines Hochschulbediensteten zum Professor an derselben Hochschule bzw. Universität, an der er bislang fest beschäftigt ist. In der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR) war die Hausberufung eine übliche Vorgehensweise.In der Bundesrepublik Deutschland besteht hingegen landläufig ein sogenanntes Hausberufungsverbot … Ziel der Beschränkungen ist es, eine ungebührliche "wissenschaftliche Ämterpatronage", Nepotismus oder unlautere Bevorzugung aufgrund persönlicher Beziehungen bei der Besetzung akademischer Stellen zu verhindern.

Viele oder wenig Hausberufungen machen also den Unterschied zwischen einem demokratischen und einem diktatorischen System aus.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Software

More about the AI winter

towardsdatascience.com

In the deep learning community, it is common to retrospectively blame Minsky and Papert for the onset of the first 'AI Winter,' which made neural networks fall out of fashion for over a decade. A typical narrative mentions the 'XOR Affair,' a proof that perceptrons were unable to learn even very simple logical functions as evidence of their poor expressive power. Some sources even add a pinch of drama recalling that Rosenblatt and Minsky went to the same school and even alleging that Rosenblatt's premature death in a boating accident in 1971 was a suicide in the aftermath of the criticism of his work by colleagues.

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Philosophy

Information has (capitalized) value

information has (capitalized) value

libraries have seen the impact of increased corporate domination, budget shortfalls, and the corporatization of higher education. We are gouged by publishers like Elsevier who offer package subscriptions with exponentially increasing costs … Many corporate library vendors have consolidated to further ensure market power and control, a process which has often rewarded the largest companies…. While companies like Elsevier make record profits, library workers of all types face increasingly precarious work arrangements and they serve students who are anxious about affording skyrocketing tuition as well as outrageous textbook prices.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Philosophy

Desynchronizing peer review and publication

researchprofessionalnews

The Plan S open-access initiative has announced its support for newly emerging ways of producing research papers, in which peer review takes place independently from publication in journals or on platforms.

plan S is widely known for their last major announcement

on September 12, 2018, UBS confirmed a sell rating for shares in Elsevier (RELX). Elsevier stock lost 13% between August 28 and September 19, 2018 alone

so hopefully the stock market will respond again by selling out Elsevier.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Noteworthy

Not to be applied during a worldwide pandemic

The recent nature editorial (1) is certainly right that medicine's evidence pipeline need to be fixed. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many wasteful clinical trials that were too small to produce useful results. Also highly ranked journals damaged their reputation while we have never seen before such a wave of corrections and retractions (2).

Evidence based medicine itself failed as we needed to act fast without having any randomized clinical trial of virus spreading. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Unfortunately highly respected scientists turned out to fuel the infodemic and provided some politicians the arguments that they wanted to hear. The fundamental principles of evidence-based medicine has now some cracks as we could not decide based on studies (as we also do not have any study on the efficacy of parachutes).

We had millions of data points during the COVID-19 pandemic but we are still missing accurate surveillance. Epidemiological data from representative cohorts had the lowest funding priority, mobile communication networks were not sufficiently analysed, sequencing efforts came in only recently. Future science historians will have to decide if the pandemic could have been avoided; the extent it could have been mitigated or how treatment studies could have been better coordinated.

We are now being rescued by the progress of vaccination programs and not by a dogmatic belief system. Maybe the package insert of evidence based medicine should include a warning – not to be applied during a worldwide pandemic. It looks like we need bold changes (3).

References

1. NN. Fix medicine's evidence pipeline. nature. 2021;593:168.

2. Abritis A, Marcus A, Oransky I. An "alarming" and "exceptionally high" rate of COVID-19 retractions. Account Res. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1793675

3. Morgan OW, Aguilera X, Ammon A et al. Disease surveillance for the COVID-19 era: time for bold changes. The Lancet. 2021; in press

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Software

Headless Chrome is better than wkhtmltopdf to store PDFs of websites

I have been using wkhtmltopdf for ages but as I am getting more and more issues with missing fonts, I was looking for an alternative in particular when going for websites that load dynamically.
Here is the macOS syntax

"/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome" --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=/Users/xxx/Desktop/pdf/test.pdf https://chromestatus.com/features

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Noteworthy

The Lancet >200?

Retractionwatch reports

Lancet's impact factor increased from 79.3 in last year's report to 202.7. NEJM's impact factor nearly doubled as well, from 91.2 to 176.1. Five other journals also had impact factors greater than 100 for the first time, and also published a lot of COVID-19 research: the Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Nature Reviews Immunology, and Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology.

Irrelevant numbers at all – even when used with 3 decimal points precision as in an email that I received this week

COVID-19 has clearly shown the craziness of our scientific rating system.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026
Noteworthy

COVID-19 – Trauerspiel in 4 Akten

27.11.2020 in der DMW – hier meine Meinung wiederholt

Unerwartet passiv blieben die epidemiologischen Institute und Verbände, die eigentlich NPI-Maßnahmen vorschlagen und begleiten sollten. Vorschläge zu einer bayernweiten Haushaltsstudie über zufällig ausgewählte Haus- und Kinderarztpraxen des bestehenden Influenza-Surveillance-Registers) wurden nicht verfolgt. In München wurde im März eine Studie angekündigt … allerdings gibt es Ende September keine Ergebnisse. Nationale Vorschläge einer epidemiologischen Taskforce wurden nicht aufgegriffen, ebenso wenig wie ein gemeinsames europäisches Vorgehen … Vielfach wurde deshalb die Kritik geäußert, es gleiche einem"Blindflug", wenn NPI ohne begleitende Evaluierung durchgeführt werden, zumal NPIs mit hohen ökonomischen wie psychosozialen Kosten verbunden sind…

2 Jahre später dann die “Evaluation der Rechtsgrundlagen und Maßnahmen der Pandemipolitik. Bericht des Sachsverständigenausschußes nach § 5 ABS. 9 IFSG” am 2.7.2022 unisono

Zudem ist eine belastbare Evaluation von Interventionen während der Pandemiebekämpfung zwingend erforderlich, um die Informationen für die Anpassung, Fortführung, Weiterentwicklung oder Terminierung der Maßnahmen bereitzustellen. Im Gegensatz zum Vorgehen in einigen anderen Ländern wurde in Deutschland eine fachübergreifende Begleitforschung während der Corona-Pandemie noch nicht erreicht. So gibt es noch immer kein nationales Forschungskonzept im Bereich Public Health. Eine solch fachübergreifende Begleitforschung ist aber zwingend nötig, um Entscheidungen des Krisenmanagements auf eine bessere Wissensgrundlage zu stellen.

Welcher Epidemiologe/Epidemiologin soll es nun eigentlich richten? Der angeblich wichtigste Epidemiologe suhlt sich in Glanz früherer Tage, ein anderer erstickt in Selbstbeweihräucherung. Dazu haben sich einige im Corona Nebel verlaufen oder im Gestrüpp seiner bzw ihrer Agenda verheddert. Und der Rest? Schreibt Übersichtsartikel… Schwierig also .

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 28.07.2026