Podcast zur Wissenschaftsfreiheit mit Kritik an der Antisemitismus-Resolution des Bundestages – hörenswert!
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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.
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the provider of the Web of Science platform, said it would not provide impact factors to journals that publish papers not recommended for publication by reviewers.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.
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.
(Gert Scobel ist im übrigen der einzige dem ich bisher einer Einladung zu einer TV Podiumsdiskussion gefolgt bin)
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).
And here is Fig 5 and Fig 6 of the paper under review. So did Watson & Crick follow her advice?
I don’t think so.
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.
News article and paper showing
bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize.
and some solutions
various emerging techniques should help to create chatbots that bullshit less, or that can, at least, be prodded to disclose when they are not confident in their answers. But some hallucinatory behaviours might get worse before they get better.
From the creator of wordfreq
Generative AI has polluted the data
I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans.
The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.
see my recent entry but also Science yesterday
Source of this new taxonomy is Figshare while being modified by Retraction Dashboard, It is a big update of my 2006 diagram that was itself based on a Lancet paper. 
Tilman Moser (1938-2024) schreibt in “Gottesvergiftung” seine (An-)klage gegen Gott in der langen Tradition der Psalmen, des Klageliedes, von Hiob bis zur Anklage Jesu am Kreuz
Mit der psychischen Grundfigur der Erwählung, des auserwählten Volkes, hast du dir ja schon ganz zu Anfang einen kleinen Teil der Menschheit eingefangen, einen Brückenkopf aus dem Nichts gebildet.
Weißt du, wie listig du mit den narzißtischen Bedürfnissen deiner Anhänger umgehst, wie fein dosiert du die Grade der Erwählung und der Gottesnähe verteilen kannst, wie virtuos du die Angebote von Geborgenheit, Führung, Glanz und Einzigartigkeit mischst – von den Strafangeboten einmal abgesehen -, so daß sich jeder nach seinen ureigensten, geheimsten niemals öffentlich eingestandenen Bedürfnissen bedienen kann?
Du bist raffiniert und wirst dadurch mächtig, daß du die Angebote an alle anderen im Dunkeln läßt und im Grunde dich jeder so ganz im stillen verehrt und verzehrt.
Das grundlegende Problem ist nicht, ob ein Volk, ein Stamm oder eine Gruppe von Gott erwählt wurde, sondern ob es sich als erwählt versteht. Damit wird der Glaube an die Überwertigkeit zur Realität, ganz ohne Erwählung, was auch als Thomas Theorem bekannt ist
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences / Wenn die Menschen Situationen als wirklich definieren, sind diese in ihren Konsequenzen wirklich (W. I. Thomas und D. S. Thomas)
So erfüllen sich ganz von selbst alle Prophezeiungen. Und die Konsequenz? Einfach nur furchtbar was die täglichen Nachrichten seit dem 7. Oktober bringen, eine Gewaltspirale zwischen zwei Völkern die kein Ende nimmt. Denn nicht nur die Juden Jes 42,1-4
Siehe, das ist mein Knecht, den ich halte, und mein Auserwählter, an dem meine Seele Wohlgefallen hat. Ich habe ihm meinen Geist gegeben; er wird das Recht unter die Heiden bringen.
sondern auch die Palästinenser fühlen sich auserwählt Sure 3,34
Allah hat Adam, Noah, die Familie Abrahams und die Familie Amrans vor allen anderen Menschen auserwählt.
Das mag alles etwas verkürzt sein, aber warum nicht wenn es den Kern trifft. Religion als Opium fürs Volk? Nein, nicht Opium sondern Crystal Meth.
Science was based on mutual trust a few decades years ago but with the development into a large money making and career system we cannot believe any more in published results. This affects basically all disciplines not only those that notoriously known for bad quality.
It affects now even thousands of papers that report wrong microscope manufactures as possible sign of misconduct as reported now by Retractionwatch.
One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study. The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.
So I see only one possibility: Mutual trust needs to be replaced with more vigorous control of the the research community and not just two dozen sleuths and journalists. Research integrity should become an own recognized scientific discipline with full-term departments, funding, teaching and established methods & software tools.
Please go to www.vox.com
You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.
Here are some impressions from my visit last week -a reactor dome without cooling towers. and substation without function.
<irony>Thank you very much Franz Josef Strauss, Konrad Adenauer, & Max-Planck-Gesellschaft for all your efforts</irony>
