Category Archives: Philosophy

Please do not try to tell a story but report your results

When I prepared a lecture last year on scientific paper writing I have found countless advices how to tell a story – it made it even into elife.

Don’t do that – there are lies and damned lies (Disraeli) while you are easily running into a trap when trying to “tell a story”.  Preregister your study plan, tell the world what you did right from the beginning, what did not work, why you repeated an experiment or why changed your opinion.

Writing a story from the backend distorts the proportions and misdirects attention. Ulrich Dirnagl highlighted this problem in an earlier talk here in March using the following two slides.

How we present results in a basically linear way – story telling. By NIH QUEST/Dirnagl.
How it would be fair to tell the story with numerous inputs, non working assay (primer, antibody, other samples), new literature and conference talks, where we constantly change our opinion that could have led to alternate papers. By NIH QUEST/Dirnagl

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026

So many asthma papers under fire

As an avid PubPeer reader, I found a  new  entry  by Elisabeth Bik recently about Andreas Pahl of Heidelberg Pharma who has already one retracted and several more papers under scrutiny.

Unfortunately there are now also many asthma trash papers from paper mills. Another example was identified by @gcabanac, distributed by @deevybee and published at Pubpeer.

In total there are 386 asthma entries at PubPeer. What is  really happening in this field? When I started the field there was just one misconduct case – Ranjit Kumar Chandra. That’s an increase from 1 to 386…

What makes it even more complicated that there is no border anymore to predatory journals if also respected scientists drop their names at predatory journals.  Only recently I received an email addressed to one of my former technical assistants as “professor” inviting her to send a paper…

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026

“How come the Muggles don’t hear the bus?”

This is a quote from Harry Potter book about the Knight Bus

The Knight Bus is a triple-decker, purple AEC Regent III RT that assists stranded individuals of the wizarding community through public transportation. It operates at a very fast speed and obstacles will jump out of its way. To hail the bus, a witch or wizard must stick their wand hand in the air in the same manner that a Muggle might do to hail a taxi. The Knight Bus’ conductor is Stan Shunpike, who greets passengers and handles baggage. It is driven by Ernie Prang.

How come the Muggles don’t hear the bus? Because they don’t look for it. Nobody looks for a bus moving at the speed that the Night Bus moves at.

U.S. science is moving at Night Bus speed when the White House issued a new policy yesterday that will require, by 2026, all federally-funded research results to be freely available to the public without delay.

This research, which changes our lives and transforms our world, is made possible by American tax dollars. And yet, these advancements are behind a paywall and out of reach for too many Americans. In too many cases, discrimination and structural inequalities – such as funding disadvantages experienced by minority-serving colleges and institutions – prevent some communities from reaping the rewards of the scientific and technological advancements they have helped to fund. Factors including race, age, disability status, geography, economic background, and gender have historically and systemically excluded some Americans from the accessing the full benefits of scientific research.  To tackle this injustice, and building on the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to advance policy that benefits all of America, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released new policy guidance today to ensure more equitable access to federally funded research.

What about the German muggles BMBF, DFG,  the major German academies, research and ethics organizations? How come that muggles don’t hear the bus? Because they don’t look for it. Nobody looks for a bus moving at the speed that the Night Bus moves at.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026

Human capital flight

There is an interesting paper on brain drain Why does the U.S. have the best research universities? Incentives, resources, and virtuous circles?

A demand for denominational sorting drove the creation of the nine American colonial colleges. For example, Massachusetts Puritans created Harvard to produce what they saw as a theologically sound education … Connecticut-based Puritans created Yale because they perceived that the Harvard of Massachusetts-based Puritans was too physically distant (in addition to too religiously liberal)

The authors attribute the following U.S. success to “reforms that began after the Civil War and enhanced the incentives and resources the system directs at research” which may be true.  Maybe the overall strategy of the paper is questionable, looking at biographies of Nobel prize winners  only- nevertheless the trend is clear that German impact is decreasing already in 1920 – while I always thought of an exodus of scientists only after 1933.

The U.S. does not spread so much money to  various non-university based “Großforschung” organisations and there is much more private sponsoring of U.S. universities, so monies are more concentrated.

Higher salaries, lower teaching, and enhanced laboratory space illustrate some ways in which professors’ compensation began to reflect research performance. Furthermore, this period saw the emergence of tenure, a salient reward for performance.

The emergence of tenure seems to be important if you can make your living from your work and do not need to start campaigning like #IchbinHanna in Germany.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026

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 19.02.2026

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

 

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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 19.02.2026

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 19.02.2026

(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 19.02.2026