Extraordinarily powerful images showing the failure of modelling. The grey lines show the range of outcomes the models forecast; the red line is what actually happened.
https://x.com/mattwridley/status/1719825924382724361
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by Belligerent Savant » Wed May 08, 2024 6:45 pm
Extraordinarily powerful images showing the failure of modelling. The grey lines show the range of outcomes the models forecast; the red line is what actually happened.
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Jul 17, 2024 11:06 am
@MurielBlaivePhD
I dedicate this article to the memory of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide at the age of 26 on the eve of being arrested and sentenced to 35 years in jail for trying to fight the revolting monopoly of JSTOR.
https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/a ... 20controls.
Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that
Arash Abizadeh
Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins that rival Google’s. So we decided to start our own
Arash Abizadeh is a philosopher and the Angus professor of political science at McGill University, Canada
Tue 16 Jul 2024 08.00 EDT
If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.
The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.
Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or library doesn’t subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.
The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we’d had enough, and resigned en masse.
We were sick of the academic publishing racket and had decided to try something different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be truly open access, ensuring anyone could read our articles. This will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, a not-for-profit publisher funded by a consortium of libraries and other institutions. When academic publishing is run on a not-for-profit basis, it works reasonably well. These publishers provide a real service and typically sell the final product at a reasonable price to their own community. So why aren’t there more of them?
To answer this, we have to go back a few decades, when commercial publishers began buying up journals from university presses. Exploiting their monopoly position, they then sharply raised prices. Today, a library subscription to a single journal in the humanities or social sciences typically costs more than £1,000 a year. Worse still, publishers often “bundle” journals together, forcing libraries to buy ones they don’t want in order to have access to ones they do. Between 2010 and 2019, UK universities paid more than £1bn in journal subscriptions and other publishing charges. More than 90% of these fees went to the big five commercial publishers (UCL and Manchester shelled out over £4m each). It’s worth remembering that the universities funded this research, paid the salaries of the academics who produced it and then had to pay millions of pounds to commercial publishers in order to access the end product.
Even more astonishing is the fact these publishers often charge authors for the privilege of publishing in their journals. In recent years, large publishers have begun offering so-called “open access” articles that are free to read. On the surface, this might sound like a welcome improvement. But for-profit publishers provide open access to readers only by charging authors, often thousands of pounds, to publish their own articles. Who ends up paying these substantial author fees? Once again, universities. In 2022 alone, UK institutions of higher education paid more than £112m to the big five to secure open-access publication for their authors.
This trend is having an insidious impact on knowledge production. Commercial publishers are incentivised to try to publish as many articles and journals as possible, because each additional article brings in more profit. This has led to a proliferation of junk journals that publish fake research, and has increased the pressure on rigorous journals to weaken their quality controls. It’s never been more evident that for-profit publishing simply does not align with the aims of scholarly inquiry.
There is an obvious alternative: universities, libraries, and academic funding agencies can cut out the intermediary and directly fund journals themselves, at a far lower cost. This would remove commercial pressures from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond” open access, which means the publishers charge neither authors, editors, nor readers (this is how our new journal will operate). Librarians have been urging this for years. So why haven’t academics already migrated to diamond journals?
The reason is that such journals require alternative funding sources, and even if such funding were in place, academics still face a massive collective action problem: we want a new arrangement but each of us, individually, is strongly incentivised to stick with the status quo. Career advancement depends heavily on publishing in journals with established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are often owned by commercial publishers. Many academics – particularly early-career researchers trying to secure long-term employment in an extremely difficult job market – cannot afford to take a chance on new, untested journals on their own.
This is why, as editors of one of our field’s leading journals, we feel a strong responsibility to help build collective momentum towards a better arrangement: a publishing model that no longer wastes massive amounts of public resources feeding profits to private corporations, secures editorial independence against the pressures of profit-making and makes research available to everyone, free of charge. This isn’t just an academic problem. A revolution in the publishing landscape could also help stem the tide of disinformation and propaganda in the public sphere. Such an alternative is available, but it’s hard to get there. We want to change that.
by Belligerent Savant » Sun Aug 25, 2024 11:24 am
What a colossal amount of time humanity has wasted obsessing over infectious diseases when history clearly shows that deaths from these illnesses declined by nearly 100%—without any vaccine or before any vaccine or, for that matter, any medical interventions at all. The real key to health isn't hiding from bacteria or viruses but embracing a lifestyle rooted in wellness. A nutritious whole foods diet, clean drinking water, regular exercise, sunshine, time in nature, restful sleep, genuine social connections, and a life of meaning—these are the true foundations of health. You don’t need to live in panic and fear. It's time to tune out the fearmongers and choose to live joyfully and positively.
by BenDhyan » Tue Feb 11, 2025 8:05 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Sun Feb 16, 2025 1:45 pm
Joel Salatin on bird flu & egg prices:
"I have always suggested that the survivors should be kept for breeding in order to build flock immunity. This is such a basic animal genetic principle it's not debatable. And yet U.S. scientific protocol is 'kill the healthy ones.'
Interesting fact: Of the 45 confirmed human cases, 95 people in the same households didn’t get sick. NOT ONE. But we're supposed to believe bird flu is highly contagious?
Bird flu has all the markers of fraud: unnecessary hysteria, insane protocols, and info coming from the CDC. Anything that starts 'brought to you by the CDC' should be questioned."
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Mar 13, 2025 8:17 pm
It's being called the largest research fraud in medical history.
Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer's speakers' bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals.
Now being reported across the mainstream media is the fact that Dr. Reuben accepted a $75,000 grant from Pfizer to study Celebrex in 2005. His research, which was published in a medical journal, has since been quoted by hundreds of other doctors and researchers as "proof" that Celebrex helped reduce pain during post-surgical recovery. There's only one problem with all this: No patients were ever enrolled in the study!
Dr. Scott Reuben, it turns out, faked the entire study and got it published anyway.
It wasn't the first study faked by Dr. Reuben: He also faked study data onBextra and Vioxx drugs, reports the Wall Street Journal.
As a result of Dr. Reuben's faked studies, the peer-reviewed medical journal Anesthesia & Analgesia was forced to retract 10 "scientific" papers authored by Reuben. The Day of London reports that 21 articles written by Dr. Reuben that appear in medical journals have apparently been fabricated, too, and must be retracted.
After being caught fabricating research for Big Pharma, Dr. Reuben has reportedly signed a plea agreement that will require him to return $420,000 that he received from drug companies. He also faces up to a 10-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.
He was also fired from his job at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass. after an internal audit there found that Dr. Reuben had been faking research data for 13 years.
Michael Mann and his lawyers are sanctioned by DC Court for acting in "bad faith when they presented erroneous evidence and made false representations to the jury and the Court". Decision here:
https://dropbox.com/scl/fi/yixcqfv4h1id ... jyq5c&dl=0
the decision on sanctions contains lengthy quotations from January, 29, 2024 PM. For convenience, I've posted up the full transcript - see link
https://scribd.com/document/838816389/2 ... on-1-29-24
In June 2020 responses to interrogatories (under oath) about supposed damages, Mann had claimed a lost grant in the amount of $9,713,924. In March 2023 responses, Mann reduced his claim for that grant to $112,000.
However, despite objections from the defense, Mann and his team showed the incorrect amounts to the jury.
...
The blog post that has shaken the leadership of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the world’s preeminent cancer research centers, was written some 3,000 miles away, in a bare-walled, sparsely decorated flat, save for a stack of statistics books and a collection of Rubik’s Cubes.
It’s here that Sholto David, an unemployed scientist with a doctorate in cell and molecular biology, spends his time poring over research papers looking for images with clues that they’ve been manipulated in some way to portray misleading findings — perhaps duplicated, spliced or cropped, or partially obscured.
As he’s toiled away over the past three years, often long past midnight, he’s flagged issues on more than 2,000 papers on a site called PubPeer, where researchers can critique and discuss published studies. His comments are sometimes met by a study’s author dodging the questions raised, and sometimes result in a correction or retraction. Often though, they’re met with no response.
But earlier this month, David helped ignite a furor after publishing a blog post that outlined purported errors he and other researchers noticed with images in dozens of papers from top Dana-Farber researchers, including the institute’s chief executive, COO, and research integrity officer. His tone was mocking, at times scathing: A paper co-authored by CEO Laurie Glimcher “includes some impressive contributions to art, but perhaps not to science,” he wrote; he described papers as “calamitous” or an “epic fail.” Some of the manipulations, David alleged, seemed deliberate. “Dana-Farberications,” the headline called them.
On Monday, three weeks after the blog post was published, Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber said it has plans to retract six of the papers and correct 31 of them.
...
by Grizzly » Tue Mar 18, 2025 10:11 am
by Belligerent Savant » Mon Apr 21, 2025 10:28 am
Thomas Kuhn received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1949. He was subsequently invited by Harvard president, James Conant, to develop a general science curriculum. This led him into a deep dive on history of science back to Aristotle, and how science makes progress.
Kuhn’s research led him to a provocative insight: Science does not progress through incremental accretion. Science, being executed by humans, is no less subject to human biases than any other human endeavor, despite what overweening scientists wish us to believe.
Kuhn came to see that science, being a practice and a vocation, entails the same pressure to keep things stable as any other vocation. If things are constantly changing, funding becomes unstable and scientists can’t feed their families. Simple as.
The result is that anomalous observational data isn’t accepted with open arms because science is self-correcting as scientists will imperiously claim. Anomaly is repressed, occluded so that no one’s research funding gets pulled. Kuhn called this “normal science.”
Scientists, like other people, want to be right. They also want to get paid. Kodak sat on their knowledge of CCDs instead of developing digital cameras because it would imperil their investment in the film business. Same damn thing.
When the pressure from the collection of anomalous observational data becomes too great, the whole thing starts to become unstable. Generally, some enterprising upstart comes along with an insight at this moment that turns the table over.
Einstein is a good example. Classical physics was in paroxysms over how to reconcile observations with the math and Einstein didn’t fix it, he blew it up. Moments like this are what Kuhn popularized as “paradigm shifts.”
...
That science can be and is being used as the tutelary religion of modern liberal philosophy should be obvious by now. Why can all political change be inscribed by a kind of Fukuyaman global liberal state? Because science! It’s all rational!
Science qua science no more exists transcendental to human interests than electrical grids and the tools they power would have fallen from heaven fully formed. Science is a tool and like other tools can and will be subject to power.
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