Paul M. Jones

I just came across this rather chilling interview Ed Yong did with scientific investigator Uri Simonsohn back in July.  Simonsohn has bee looking for evidence of fraud in social science research--and finding a really disturbing amount of it. "I don’t know how systemic the crime is." Simohnson told Yong.  "What’s systemic is the lack of defences. Social psychology -- and science in general -- doesn’t have sufficient mechanisms for preventing fraud. I doubt that fabrication is any worse in psychology than in other fields. But I’m worried by how easy it was for me to come across these people."  

Read the whole thing. Short version: there are a lot of studies that cannot be replicated, but they still pass as "science." Bushwah. Via Searching for Fraud - The Daily Beast.

Update: From the comments; disturbing if true:

I have a good friend that is a PHD in BioMed. He went through engineering with me and then stuck around to get a couple of masters in mechanical and chemical engineering before jumping into BioMed. His observation is that close to 80% of all medical studies are flawed, half due to poor statistical controls and half due to fraud. Several years ago he caught a new superstar PHD committing fraud by dramatically manipulating his results to fit the curve. Despite the overwhelming evidence the PHD was still offered tenure because his "results" brought in funding and publications.

The average female Army recruit is 4.8 inches shorter, 31.7 pounds lighter, has 37.4 fewer pounds of muscle, and 5.7 more pounds of fat than the average male recruit. She has only 55 percent of the upper-body strength and 72 percent of the lower-body strength... An Army study of 124 men and 186 women done in 1988 found that women are more than twice as likely to suffer leg injuries and nearly five times as likely to suffer fractures as men.

The Commission heard an abundance of expert testimony about the physical differences between men and women that can be summarized as follows:

Women's aerobic capacity is significantly lower, meaning they cannot carry as much as far as fast as men, and they are more susceptible to fatigue.

In terms of physical capability, the upper five percent of women are at the level of the male median. The average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man.

The same report also cited a West Point study from the early 90s which discovered that, in terms of fitness, the upper quintile of female cadets achieved scores equal to the lowest quintile of their male counterparts.

via In From the Cold: Too Many White Guys.

In all the argument over whether conservatives were taking "you didn't build that" out of context, few on the left acknowledged that he was trying to say what Warren had said to such acclaim from the Democratic base. Even in context, the argument that accomplishment in business is collective is deeply offensive to most people in business, at least when they are not camouflaging themselves at a college town cocktail party. Since many liberals are genuinely baffled about why this should be so, I shall try to explain. Suffice it to say that the reasons are legion.

The very argument is disingenuous. Neither mainstream Republicans nor the Tea Party activists who drove the 2010 election are against public roads, public education, police departments, firefighters (Warren) or, even, technology spin-offs from necessary spending on national defense (Obama, re the Internet). There has been a broad national consensus around each of these for between 100 and 200 years (I am sure we all remember that Eli Whitney's invention of interchangeable parts was in the context of defense spending). To suggest otherwise is to erect and demolish a straw man ...

Even if, as a liberal might respond, there are many other examples of government spending that helps "successful" people (in Obama's expression) or factory builders (in Warren's), the argument is still a straw man. The argument today is not between minimal government and Communism. Today government at all levels accounts for 39% of GDP, up from 33% or so during the now halcyon Clinton years. That range defines the mainstream debate -- most Republicans would be thrilled to return government's share of GDP to Clinton-era levels, and most Democrats would be outraged. The range might expand to 46% or so at the high end if one includes the 80-100 Democrats in the House who would fully nationalize health care, and falls to perhaps 30% at the bottom if one includes the most conservative Tea Partiers who would privatize Social Security. But that is the widest possible scope of the disagreement, and under no circumstances does it contemplate that we should do away with roads, police, teachers, firefighters, or national defense. To suggest otherwise, as Warren and Obama have done, is so transparently dishonest that it can only be explained as an attack on "successful" people for political advantage. They noticed.

All emphasis mine. Via TigerHawk.

The administration is essentially arguing that IPAB will cut costs only by reducing provider incomes, not by curtailing in any way the consumption of Medicare beneficiaries.  This is possible, I suppose, but it is not supported by either economic theory, or historical evidence.  (And indeed, the early discussons of health care reform, as well as my interactions with the administration's very smart economists, make me suspect that they, too, believe that IPAB will curtail service provision . . . but also believe, correctly, that saying so would be political suicide.) 

The "fact checkers" have thus somehow annointed the least likely outcome as a "fact" about the future.  

This is, as others pointed out during the welfare kerfuffle, the great problem with fact checkers.  They have no particular policy domain knowledge, so when the administration tells them that well, the law explicitly forbids IPAB from rationing treatments, they are in no position to understand that this doesn't really make any sense.  

There's nothing wrong with opining based on the information you have; the problem is with calling the results a "fact".  The even bigger problem is that other journalists then treat it as such, transforming a shallow understanding without roots in history or theory, into a known thing, no different from stating the color of the sky or the height of Mount Rushmore.  Then, of course, they're free to declare that anyone who disagrees is lying.  

via Facts, Damned "Facts", and Fact Checkers - The Daily Beast.

Shows like Sesame Street are multi-million dollar enterprises capable of thriving in the private market. According to the 990 tax form all nonprofits are required to file, Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell received $956,513 -- nearly a million dollars -- in compensation in 2008. And, from 2003 to 2006, "Sesame Street" made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales. 

If you break that down, it works out to over $50 million a year "Sesame Street" is taking in from all that merchandising.

Yep, that one-percenter Big Bird makes about four times what Mitt Romney does annually and yet Barack Obama still wants you and I to still carry his freight.

via Big Bird Richer Than Mitt Romney.

And for what? A few votes:

The Obama administration has sought to quell the fear of mass defense layoffs in presidential battlegrounds like Virginia, where letters sent in early November warning about the possibility of job losses could discourage thousands of defense workers from backing the incumbent.

The government's guarantee to foot the bill for legal problems, as long as contractors heed OMB's advice to refrain from warning about lob losses, is unusual.

"I don't know of any situation where the government has done this in the past," said William Gould, a labor professor at Stanford Law School.  

via Just Say No To Layoff Notices - The Daily Beast.

Then they'll pay attention. Right?

Free speech is a gift given to us in 1948 by U.N. officials? Who knew?

The only appropriate response of free-born peoples to such a statement is: **** off, ******. Free speech is not in the gift of minor Swedish timeserving hack bureaucrats, either to grant or withdraw.

Where is the “respect”, by the way, in “Behead the enemies of Islam”? Under the not so subtle evolution of “free speech” advanced by the likes of Obama and Eliasson, you’ll be shackled by “respect” and “the need to avoid provocations” but kindergartners will still be able to parade around the local park demanding “Behead all those who insult the Prophet.”

In the end, the one-way multiculturalism of craven squishes like Eliasson will destroy our world. Nuts to him and to the U.N.

via Behead All Those Who Insult Free Speech - By Mark Steyn - The Corner - National Review Online.

Heisenberg’s principle can be crudely generalized (it’s the best I can do) as follows: An observer can change the nature of a thing or an event merely through the act of observation. Observation all by itself can become an intervention. Heisenberg was describing how reality works at the level of quantum mechanics, where a wave becomes a particle and vice versa depending on how it’s being measured. But it applies, too, at the level of political journalism, where reality is even stranger. There, facts can become interpretations, interpretations can become facts, and events of no significance can achieve an earthshaking importance simply by virtue of being pawed over by a large number of journalists.

A typical journalist, if he’s any good, insists at least theoretically on the iron divide between observer and participant. At its best the press corps sees itself as a squadron of Red Cross workers, wandering among the combatants in a battle zone and ensuring their own safety with a claim of strict neutrality. The Heisenberg Principle of Journalism puts the lie to all that. You see it at work whenever a news anchor announces that “this story just refuses to go away” or a headline writer insists that “questions continue to be raised” about the conduct of one hapless public figure or another.

The story refuses to go away, of course, because the anchor and his colleagues won’t let it; and the questions that continue to be raised are being raised by the headline writer and his editors. Reporters create more news than anybody, just by pretending they’re watching it unfold.

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » OBSERVATION CAN BE AN INTERVENTION: Andrew Ferguson’s “Press Man” back page column at Commentary is ….

"What if Congress passes an unjust law, the President signs it, and the Supreme Court upholds it?"

"What if the government conscripts you to fight in an unjust war, and you die a horrible death?"

"What if a poor person drinks and gambles away his welfare check?"

"What if the government denies you permission to legally work?"

"What if the President decides your ethnicity is a national security risk and puts you in a concentration camp, and the Supreme Court declares his action constitutional?"

"What if a person lives an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, so by the time they're retired, they're in constant pain no matter how generous their Medicare coverage is?"

"What happens if a President lies to start a war, and voters don't particularly care?"

Once you start the what-if game, it's hard to stop.  Name any political system.  I can generate endless hypotheticals to aggravate its supporters.  The right lesson to draw: Every political perspective eventually has to say "Tough luck" when confronted with well-crafted what-ifs.  There's nothing uniquely hard-hearted or cruel about libertarianism.  Defenders of democracy, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, the American Constitution, and social democracy all eventually sigh, "Life's not fair," or "Well, what do you want me to do about it?"

via Tough Luck, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

This explains so much:

A new brain study suggests an opium-like chemical may drive the urge to gorge on chocolate candy and similar fatty and sweet treats.

Researchers discovered this when they gave rats an artificial boost with a drug that went straight to a brain region called the neostriatum: it caused the animals to eat twice the amount of M&Ms they would otherwise have eaten.

The team also found that when the rats began to eat the chocolate-coated candies, there was a surge in enkephalin, a natural opium-like substance that is produced in the same region of the brain.

via Chocolate Gorging Linked To Opium Chemical In Brain.