Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Good post. The PB Toy Soldiers are a particularly unfunny joke. The worst thing about this site.
"PB Toy Soldier" being someone who thinks that a sovereign state is entitled to defend itself from invasion.
Do they lack external genitalia but have scars on their cheeks?
Probably
What about PB Toy Bettors? Or the PB Toy Political Commentators?
Yes. But was 'woke' ever not derogatory? I always understood it as a term of the social conservative* to diss the socially progressive*, the modern day equivalent of 'political correctness'
*for want of better terms - I'm aware that 'progressive' in itself is loaded (who wants to be regressive?) but can't think of a better term
ETA: To some extent it's regression to the mean, or regression to the centre to become electable. People have other issues, so a party obsessed with wokeness (on either side) is unlikely to command wide enough support to win.
“Woke” originates within the Black activist community in the US back in the 1930s. If you were woke, you had become truly aware of the persistent nature of white supremacy & the work done by the state to prevent black people from prospering.
I’m not sure when it took on a wider social justice meaning, sometime post 2000 I think - I certainly never heard it as a teenager at university, but maybe I didn’t move in the right activist circles?
Like many social justice terms it then hopped over to the right as a prejudicial term, a route that echoes that took by “politically correct” in earlier times.
Only problem is the majority of white Americans have never supported "white supremacy", even in the 1930s.
Yes, Jim Crow was the antithesis of white supremacy.
I'm on my mobile, but I'll dig up the Gallup polling from that era that showed majority support for things like anti-miscegenation laws.
Edit - An overwhelmingly a majority of Americans supported The original constitution, you know the one that valued a negro at three-fifths of a white man.
There is a very well-written exchange in the film Hidden Figures (about black mathematicians working for NASA and having to deal with segregated bathrooms and seperate coffee jugs and the like) where the ultimate Karen character tells one of them "we've got nothing against y'all" and she replies something like "I am sure you genuinely believe that". I think that probably sums up the situation pretty well.
"So what is 0.04 if it is not a percentage (Five marks: show working)"
It is all there, embodied in that one sentence, the effortless elitism of the public school fool.
There is a slight But here. For not very bright non-maths people (like me) there is a genuine problem that there are too many ways of expressing probabilities and proportions (including in betting).
This is also true of averages and the different things this can mean to a statistician.
Clarity and simplicity always help. But of course not always what those communicating want.
"So what is 0.04 if it is not a percentage (Five marks: show working)"
It is all there, embodied in that one sentence, the effortless elitism of the public school fool.
I have to say, I did smile at the "(Five marks: show working)" part. However, I think what Boris showed here is what a very large part of the entire journalistic and political professions demonstrated through Covid. They just didn't understand, and probably still don't, the maths.
Casting a percentage as a probability out of 1 is always going to cause some confusion, though, since the latter is essentially never used in everyday life (about the only "civilian" usage I can think of off the top of my head is some baseball statistics, which is an extrmely niche thing in the UK!)
If I read something in the FT about CFR or IFR that says "0.04" I'd wonder why they left the % sign off. And only after that would I start to think that they might be writing it out of 1.
Great PR move by the king: evict his son Harry Egalité so the ever popular Andrew can move in. That'll go down well in the focus groups.
His being visited by Ursula von der Leyen in connection with the Windsor Framework (!) didn't please Nigel Farage at all. Is it possible the king will have the rightwing press against him by the time of his coronation? He's got to pull a few positives out of the hat or else have a utility-scheme crowning job - and the latter's not happening.
Evicting Harry would indeed be popular.
And so would making Andrew down-size from 31 rooms to a pauper's 10 rooms.
It would be even more popular if he had to downsize to a Federal Supermax prison in the USA.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Many many years ago I spent some time teaching programmers and analysts some basic accounting. Copying 'I'm sorry I'll read that again' and a well known company who used to teach this stuff I made up stories with silly names. My favourite creation was a bad debt problem where William Yardque was buying snooker balls from his Russian supplier Inoff the Red, but got purple balls the size of footballs delivered instead.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
Now we all accept it “came from the lab“ we can focus on the nuances of this question. Because it is nuanced
In order of ascending outrageousness
1. They collected a bat - maybe even in Yunnan, where the caves are - and it pissed on some poor lab worker, who brought the virus to the Wuhan wet market (surely the superspreader event)
2. They had bats in the lab and one bit a worker and etc etc
3. They passed the virus through humanized mice and a mouse bit etc etc
4. They added gain of function - for the best of reasons (improved vaccines) to the virus and the new nastier virus somehow infected a worker who went to the market
5. They added gain of function for generally good reasons but there were lurking bioweapons motivations as well - create nasty coronaviruses that can cripple economies - we know China is interested in this, Wuhan researchers are linked to Chinese military scientists who have openly talked about this, and written about it. The GOF’d virus got out, and etc etc
6. The evil scientists created a GOF’d coronavirus and DELIBERATELY released it as a bio weapon
There are probably more scenarios I’ve missed, but I am drinking a G&T
Of these my hunch is 1-4 as the most likely. Equally likely. 3 or 4 if I had to wager money
But 5 is still quite possible, even 6 at a pinch, tho it seems highly improbable. Why release a virus bio-weapon before your have a vaccine for your people? Fairly mad
What happened without any shadow of a doubt is that there was a shameful cover-up of much of this, and an attempt to blame the wet market, thus exonerating China and science entirely - and people should go to prison for this, for many years
I know this will bring your usual childish insults down on my head, but I don't *accept* it “came from the lab“
I accept it *may* have come from a lab, which I believe I have said all along. It is now looking slightly more likely (although have the FBI released the evidence on which they based their comments?) But it's far from certain.
(Yawns, as he awaits the insults...)
At this point you’re just too dull to insult, it’s like bitch-slapping a donkey
Serious question - why are you so invested in lab leak?
My theory - correct me if it's wrong - is you were pushing it early and got called a Trumpian scumbag by armies of the woke.
I just enjoy being smarter and quicker on the uptake than most. Not hard with the lefty slow learners of PB, it’s true. I’m not really testing myself. And it’s probably an unpleasant spectacle to witness, and I shouldn’t gloat when I manage to outthink imbeciles
Still fun tho. Heh. And at my advanced years I take my pleasures where I can
But my theory - since I have my moments too.
WERE you pushing it from the get-go? Did you intuit the answer before the evidence? Sounds spooky but Donald Trump managed it so I can imagine a select few others did. I honestly don't remember. I wouldn't ask if I did.
it doesn’t take God-like intuition to work out that an apparently engineered novel bat coronavirus with unusual pathogenicity emerging in Wuhan, the only city in the world with advanced biolabs dedicated to engineering novel bat coronaviruses to be more pathogenic, was QUITE the coincidence
And then the coincidences piled up, month by month. That’s it. The evidence WAS there from the get-go, the emails between scientists at the time - January 2020 - acknowledged all this! Give up your pointless quest
This debate is over. It came from the lab. We will never know *for sure* but we now know in the much higher 90s percentwise. Enough
I had a root around the old threads, and TimT posted in spring 2020 about a Nature paper published about gain of function research at the Wuhan lab on coronaviruses in mice. Not really sure why you're identifying someone as a seer on the basis of an article published in 2021.
I remember persuading TimT to look again at lab origin in early 2020. To his credit (he blamed zoonosis at first) he did so
You know what, I am beyond arguing about this. I was right. I have surely been wrong about many things, as @Peter_the_Punter points out, and I naturally focus on the things I got correct. A selection bias
But I WAS right about this
Now, I shall go and watch BETTER CALL SAUL Season 2. Later
In fairness, Leon (yeah, it hurts but still) you have been known to admit it when you're wrong.
Not sure the same is true of Trump, so apologies for bracketing you with him in this connection.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
Don't worry about it, the rest of society and the economy is ever more crap at delivery and tolerant of fraudulent incentives and systems too.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Good post. The PB Toy Soldiers are a particularly unfunny joke. The worst thing about this site.
No, your self appointed role as PB style guardian wins that honour.
Beyond tedious.
I was tempted to add your misogynistic garbage about dockside sex workers to the list but it's so far beyond the pale it would have served only to trivialise it.
You are such a misogynist, your brain automatically assumes hookers have to be women.
Most of the sex workers I have encountered in my life are males.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Many many years ago I spent some time teaching programmers and analysts some basic accounting. Copying 'I'm sorry I'll read that again' and a well known company who used to teach this stuff I made up stories with silly names. My favourite creation was a bad debt problem where William Yardque was buying snooker balls from his Russian supplier Inoff the Red, but got purple balls the size of footballs delivered instead.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
Sounds like you almost managed to make accounting sound interesting!
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Many many years ago I spent some time teaching programmers and analysts some basic accounting. Copying 'I'm sorry I'll read that again' and a well known company who used to teach this stuff I made up stories with silly names. My favourite creation was a bad debt problem where William Yardque was buying snooker balls from his Russian supplier Inoff the Red, but got purple balls the size of footballs delivered instead.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
Sounds like you almost managed to make accounting sound interesting!
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Good post. The PB Toy Soldiers are a particularly unfunny joke. The worst thing about this site.
No, your self appointed role as PB style guardian wins that honour.
Beyond tedious.
I was tempted to add your misogynistic garbage about dockside sex workers to the list but it's so far beyond the pale it would have served only to trivialise it.
You are such a misogynist, your brain automatically assumes hookers have to be women.
Most of the sex workers I have encountered in my life are males.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Good post. The PB Toy Soldiers are a particularly unfunny joke. The worst thing about this site.
No, your self appointed role as PB style guardian wins that honour.
Beyond tedious.
I was tempted to add your misogynistic garbage about dockside sex workers to the list but it's so far beyond the pale it would have served only to trivialise it.
Most of the sex workers I have encountered in my life are males.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Good post. The PB Toy Soldiers are a particularly unfunny joke. The worst thing about this site.
No, your self appointed role as PB style guardian wins that honour.
Beyond tedious.
I was tempted to add your misogynistic garbage about dockside sex workers to the list but it's so far beyond the pale it would have served only to trivialise it.
Most of the sex workers I have encountered in my life are males.
A Christian lawyer who called down biblical curses on the head of a rival barrister has been struck off for serious misconduct.
Solicitor Alvin Just sent 'inappropriate and unprofessional' emails to barrister Philip Noble after clashing during a will dispute at Central London County Court in 2017.
He told Mr Noble: 'You are just fading away one step closer to your grave...I will not lose any sleep for your nonsense, as I know the plagues will fall on you just like Pharaoh.'
Mr Just also added that the barrister reminded him of 'a Grade 7 bully' that he 'had to slam to the ground'.
Messages were sent to Mr Noble's client as well, warning: 'Your judgement is coming soon beware, and it will not be an easy one, the Most High knows that.. Just remember that whosoever diggeth a pit shall fall in it.'
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Many many years ago I spent some time teaching programmers and analysts some basic accounting. Copying 'I'm sorry I'll read that again' and a well known company who used to teach this stuff I made up stories with silly names. My favourite creation was a bad debt problem where William Yardque was buying snooker balls from his Russian supplier Inoff the Red, but got purple balls the size of footballs delivered instead.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
That sounds a lot more funky than our lecturer was! No room for comedy with him.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
Do it the way that security works - white hats etc. Pay for finding fraud.
There'd be a whole industry of fact checkers on it like a tramp on chips.
Great PR move by the king: evict his son Harry Egalité so the ever popular Andrew can move in. That'll go down well in the focus groups.
His being visited by Ursula von der Leyen in connection with the Windsor Framework (!) didn't please Nigel Farage at all. Is it possible the king will have the rightwing press against him by the time of his coronation? He's got to pull a few positives out of the hat or else have a utility-scheme crowning job - and the latter's not happening.
Evicting Harry would indeed be popular.
Indeed and the King is evicting Andrew from the much bigger Royal Lodge and telling him to either take the smaller Frogmore cottage he is evicting Harry and Meghan from or end up on the streets (the Sussexes do at least have a $10 million California mansion still).
It is a hugely popular move from the King to cut down expenses on the most unpopular royals, neither of whom are working royals now anyway
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
And as for the headline 10% figure, it's much lower across research funding in general, outwith QR, I should think. In my recent grants, publication costs have been around 2%, though that would vary a lot by field. Data costs are high for me, can be 20% or more of funding, which inflates the denominator.
Now we all accept it “came from the lab“ we can focus on the nuances of this question. Because it is nuanced
In order of ascending outrageousness
1. They collected a bat - maybe even in Yunnan, where the caves are - and it pissed on some poor lab worker, who brought the virus to the Wuhan wet market (surely the superspreader event)
2. They had bats in the lab and one bit a worker and etc etc
3. They passed the virus through humanized mice and a mouse bit etc etc
4. They added gain of function - for the best of reasons (improved vaccines) to the virus and the new nastier virus somehow infected a worker who went to the market
5. They added gain of function for generally good reasons but there were lurking bioweapons motivations as well - create nasty coronaviruses that can cripple economies - we know China is interested in this, Wuhan researchers are linked to Chinese military scientists who have openly talked about this, and written about it. The GOF’d virus got out, and etc etc
6. The evil scientists created a GOF’d coronavirus and DELIBERATELY released it as a bio weapon
There are probably more scenarios I’ve missed, but I am drinking a G&T
Of these my hunch is 1-4 as the most likely. Equally likely. 3 or 4 if I had to wager money
But 5 is still quite possible, even 6 at a pinch, tho it seems highly improbable. Why release a virus bio-weapon before your have a vaccine for your people? Fairly mad
What happened without any shadow of a doubt is that there was a shameful cover-up of much of this, and an attempt to blame the wet market, thus exonerating China and science entirely - and people should go to prison for this, for many years
I know this will bring your usual childish insults down on my head, but I don't *accept* it “came from the lab“
I accept it *may* have come from a lab, which I believe I have said all along. It is now looking slightly more likely (although have the FBI released the evidence on which they based their comments?) But it's far from certain.
(Yawns, as he awaits the insults...)
At this point you’re just too dull to insult, it’s like bitch-slapping a donkey
Serious question - why are you so invested in lab leak?
My theory - correct me if it's wrong - is you were pushing it early and got called a Trumpian scumbag by armies of the woke.
I just enjoy being smarter and quicker on the uptake than most. Not hard with the lefty slow learners of PB, it’s true. I’m not really testing myself. And it’s probably an unpleasant spectacle to witness, and I shouldn’t gloat when I manage to outthink imbeciles
Still fun tho. Heh. And at my advanced years I take my pleasures where I can
But my theory - since I have my moments too.
WERE you pushing it from the get-go? Did you intuit the answer before the evidence? Sounds spooky but Donald Trump managed it so I can imagine a select few others did. I honestly don't remember. I wouldn't ask if I did.
it doesn’t take God-like intuition to work out that an apparently engineered novel bat coronavirus with unusual pathogenicity emerging in Wuhan, the only city in the world with advanced biolabs dedicated to engineering novel bat coronaviruses to be more pathogenic, was QUITE the coincidence
And then the coincidences piled up, month by month. That’s it. The evidence WAS there from the get-go, the emails between scientists at the time - January 2020 - acknowledged all this! Give up your pointless quest
This debate is over. It came from the lab. We will never know *for sure* but we now know in the much higher 90s percentwise. Enough
I had a root around the old threads, and TimT posted in spring 2020 about a Nature paper published about gain of function research at the Wuhan lab on coronaviruses in mice. Not really sure why you're identifying someone as a seer on the basis of an article published in 2021.
I remember persuading TimT to look again at lab origin in early 2020. To his credit (he blamed zoonosis at first) he did so
You know what, I am beyond arguing about this. I was right. I have surely been wrong about many things, as @Peter_the_Punter points out, and I naturally focus on the things I got correct. A selection bias
But I WAS right about this
Now, I shall go and watch BETTER CALL SAUL Season 2. Later
If you want to believe you are right fine, but its definitely not definite, and only a non-scientist would think it is.
"So what is 0.04 if it is not a percentage (Five marks: show working)"
It is all there, embodied in that one sentence, the effortless elitism of the public school fool.
I have to say, I did smile at the "(Five marks: show working)" part. However, I think what Boris showed here is what a very large part of the entire journalistic and political professions demonstrated through Covid. They just didn't understand, and probably still don't, the maths.
Does this not depend on clarity from the source though? If you are discussing percentages, use the symbol. If not make it plain.
"So what is 0.04 if it is not a percentage (Five marks: show working)"
It is all there, embodied in that one sentence, the effortless elitism of the public school fool.
I have to say, I did smile at the "(Five marks: show working)" part. However, I think what Boris showed here is what a very large part of the entire journalistic and political professions demonstrated through Covid. They just didn't understand, and probably still don't, the maths.
Does this not depend on clarity from the source though? If you are discussing percentages, use the symbol. If not make it plain.
It is quite possible that the person who wrote the source article didn't understand either.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Many many years ago I spent some time teaching programmers and analysts some basic accounting. Copying 'I'm sorry I'll read that again' and a well known company who used to teach this stuff I made up stories with silly names. My favourite creation was a bad debt problem where William Yardque was buying snooker balls from his Russian supplier Inoff the Red, but got purple balls the size of footballs delivered instead.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
That sounds a lot more funky than our lecturer was! No room for comedy with him.
Oh I've got loads more where they came from:
The lorry driver Art Ticulatedlorry
The Post office worker Penelope Stamp
And of course there are the old favourites that start with a 'Sir' - The drunk doctor Sir Irrhosistheliver and the newspaper baron Sir Culation.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
Scientific publishing has outlived its usefulness. Journals should go.
arXivs & open journals are way cheaper and can be run by the scientific communities themselves. That gets most of the 10 per cent of the budget back for research immediately.
I think the advantages of peer-review are over-stated.
The only reason for rejecting a paper is if it is demonstrably wrong. Actually, very, very few papers fall into that category.
Many scientific papers are demonstrably uninteresting (what fraction of papers never get cited?). But, I would hesitate to say a paper should be rejected as it is very boring.
If the costs of publishing are substantially reduced, I have no problem with tedious papers being available electronically.
It is like pb.com -- I have no problem with tedious, uninteresting posts (and who am I to say a poster is tedious anyhow, maybe it is my fault, maybe my interests are narrow).
"So what is 0.04 if it is not a percentage (Five marks: show working)"
It is all there, embodied in that one sentence, the effortless elitism of the public school fool.
I have to say, I did smile at the "(Five marks: show working)" part. However, I think what Boris showed here is what a very large part of the entire journalistic and political professions demonstrated through Covid. They just didn't understand, and probably still don't, the maths.
Does this not depend on clarity from the source though? If you are discussing percentages, use the symbol. If not make it plain.
It is quite possible that the person who wrote the source article didn't understand either.
This can sometimes happen if you are asked to restate a Y axis as numbers, with "per cent" in the axis title. You need to remember to x100.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Many many years ago I spent some time teaching programmers and analysts some basic accounting. Copying 'I'm sorry I'll read that again' and a well known company who used to teach this stuff I made up stories with silly names. My favourite creation was a bad debt problem where William Yardque was buying snooker balls from his Russian supplier Inoff the Red, but got purple balls the size of footballs delivered instead.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
Sounds like you almost managed to make accounting sound interesting!
Oi!
What I mean, though, is that double entry is a no bullshit proper discipline. It's a craft. The white collar equivalent of something like dry stone walling. When you apply the ancient but never bettered techniques to turn a load of messy info into something correct and perfectly balanced you feel a satisfaction you don't get from the things you end up doing in 'management'. I was happy doing grunt accounting, then became unhappy when I 'rose' to consulting and all of that nonsense, despite it being better paid and higher status, and only became happy again when I fell into bond trading - another 'no bullshit' activity.
"So what is 0.04 if it is not a percentage (Five marks: show working)"
It is all there, embodied in that one sentence, the effortless elitism of the public school fool.
I have to say, I did smile at the "(Five marks: show working)" part. However, I think what Boris showed here is what a very large part of the entire journalistic and political professions demonstrated through Covid. They just didn't understand, and probably still don't, the maths.
Does this not depend on clarity from the source though? If you are discussing percentages, use the symbol. If not make it plain.
It is quite possible that the person who wrote the source article didn't understand either.
This can sometimes happen if you are asked to restate a Y axis as numbers, with "per cent" in the axis title. You need to remember to x100.
Not to mention the fun that can result from import and export with Excel. And the City runs on Excel.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
And as for the headline 10% figure, it's much lower across research funding in general, outwith QR, I should think. In my recent grants, publication costs have been around 2%, though that would vary a lot by field. Data costs are high for me, can be 20% or more of funding, which inflates the denominator.
It is not the publication costs of the articles.
It is the subscription cost your Department is paying for electronic access to the Journals. How much is that?
10 years old, but this is still a good (& free) article:
The final sentences sums it up: By and large, the problem does not arise from outright fraud, which is rare. It arises from official pressure to publish when you have nothing to say.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
Scientific publishing has outlived its usefulness. Journals should go.
arXivs & open journals are way cheaper and can be run by the scientific communities themselves. That gets most of the 10 per cent of the budget back for research immediately.
I think the advantages of peer-review are over-stated.
The only reason for rejecting a paper is if it is demonstrably wrong. Actually, very, very few papers fall into that category.
Many scientific papers are demonstrably uninteresting (what fraction of papers never get cited?). But, I would hesitate to say a paper should be rejected as it is very boring.
If the costs of publishing are substantially reduced, I have no problem with tedious papers being available electronically.
It is like pb.com -- I have no problem with tedious, uninteresting posts (and who am I to say a poster is tedious anyhow, maybe it is my fault, maybe my interests are narrow).
I disagree, to an extent, on peer review. There are few, if any, of my papers that have not been improved by going through peer review, either through consideration of other issues/explanations/sensitivity analyses or simply making it more precisely worded or more readable and clearer to someone not completely embedded in the field or in research. Editorial boards can also serve as gatekeepers in keeping the obvious crap from publication. But things should be a lot cheaper now with, essentially free, online publishing.
I agree that boring stuff should get published. Non-results are also very important, particularly when collating papers for a systematic review. Yet we still go for the established high profile journals that will reject non results as that gives us the potential still for greatest reach (and citations) and wins brownie points for progression etc.
Now we all accept it “came from the lab“ we can focus on the nuances of this question. Because it is nuanced
In order of ascending outrageousness
1. They collected a bat - maybe even in Yunnan, where the caves are - and it pissed on some poor lab worker, who brought the virus to the Wuhan wet market (surely the superspreader event)
2. They had bats in the lab and one bit a worker and etc etc
3. They passed the virus through humanized mice and a mouse bit etc etc
4. They added gain of function - for the best of reasons (improved vaccines) to the virus and the new nastier virus somehow infected a worker who went to the market
5. They added gain of function for generally good reasons but there were lurking bioweapons motivations as well - create nasty coronaviruses that can cripple economies - we know China is interested in this, Wuhan researchers are linked to Chinese military scientists who have openly talked about this, and written about it. The GOF’d virus got out, and etc etc
6. The evil scientists created a GOF’d coronavirus and DELIBERATELY released it as a bio weapon
There are probably more scenarios I’ve missed, but I am drinking a G&T
Of these my hunch is 1-4 as the most likely. Equally likely. 3 or 4 if I had to wager money
But 5 is still quite possible, even 6 at a pinch, tho it seems highly improbable. Why release a virus bio-weapon before your have a vaccine for your people? Fairly mad
What happened without any shadow of a doubt is that there was a shameful cover-up of much of this, and an attempt to blame the wet market, thus exonerating China and science entirely - and people should go to prison for this, for many years
I know this will bring your usual childish insults down on my head, but I don't *accept* it “came from the lab“
I accept it *may* have come from a lab, which I believe I have said all along. It is now looking slightly more likely (although have the FBI released the evidence on which they based their comments?) But it's far from certain.
(Yawns, as he awaits the insults...)
At this point you’re just too dull to insult, it’s like bitch-slapping a donkey
Serious question - why are you so invested in lab leak?
My theory - correct me if it's wrong - is you were pushing it early and got called a Trumpian scumbag by armies of the woke.
I just enjoy being smarter and quicker on the uptake than most. Not hard with the lefty slow learners of PB, it’s true. I’m not really testing myself. And it’s probably an unpleasant spectacle to witness, and I shouldn’t gloat when I manage to outthink imbeciles
Still fun tho. Heh. And at my advanced years I take my pleasures where I can
But my theory - since I have my moments too.
WERE you pushing it from the get-go? Did you intuit the answer before the evidence? Sounds spooky but Donald Trump managed it so I can imagine a select few others did. I honestly don't remember. I wouldn't ask if I did.
it doesn’t take God-like intuition to work out that an apparently engineered novel bat coronavirus with unusual pathogenicity emerging in Wuhan, the only city in the world with advanced biolabs dedicated to engineering novel bat coronaviruses to be more pathogenic, was QUITE the coincidence
And then the coincidences piled up, month by month. That’s it. The evidence WAS there from the get-go, the emails between scientists at the time - January 2020 - acknowledged all this! Give up your pointless quest
This debate is over. It came from the lab. We will never know *for sure* but we now know in the much higher 90s percentwise. Enough
I had a root around the old threads, and TimT posted in spring 2020 about a Nature paper published about gain of function research at the Wuhan lab on coronaviruses in mice. Not really sure why you're identifying someone as a seer on the basis of an article published in 2021.
I remember persuading TimT to look again at lab origin in early 2020. To his credit (he blamed zoonosis at first) he did so
You know what, I am beyond arguing about this. I was right. I have surely been wrong about many things, as @Peter_the_Punter points out, and I naturally focus on the things I got correct. A selection bias
But I WAS right about this
Now, I shall go and watch BETTER CALL SAUL Season 2. Later
If you want to believe you are right fine, but its definitely not definite, and only a non-scientist would think it is.
For his own sake I kind of hope he is right. I worry how he'd handle it if they end up finding the bat that started it and it turns out it never went near a lab.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
Scientific publishing has outlived its usefulness. Journals should go.
arXivs & open journals are way cheaper and can be run by the scientific communities themselves. That gets most of the 10 per cent of the budget back for research immediately.
I think the advantages of peer-review are over-stated.
The only reason for rejecting a paper is if it is demonstrably wrong. Actually, very, very few papers fall into that category.
Many scientific papers are demonstrably uninteresting (what fraction of papers never get cited?). But, I would hesitate to say a paper should be rejected as it is very boring.
If the costs of publishing are substantially reduced, I have no problem with tedious papers being available electronically.
It is like pb.com -- I have no problem with tedious, uninteresting posts (and who am I to say a poster is tedious anyhow, maybe it is my fault, maybe my interests are narrow).
Something to be said for that - and as the recent availability of online preprints showed, it's pretty clear soon enough which papers are deserving of attention. Unfettered access might also mean it's a lot easier to spot fraud and data manipulation.
Though the world is still impressed, rightly or not, by publication in the prestige journals. And in some sense they do still provide, however imperfectly, a fairly strong quality filter. Which saves time. It is a scam, but it's not entirely without purpose.
Whoa, that was a long read. Tldr; Posh white bloke says it's wrong to blame posh white blokes for everything and absurd to wonder if non posh non white non blokes have been unfairly treated by traditional historical scholarship. MRDA. I particularly liked the bit where he mansplained Edward Said and Foucault as if he was the first person to have ever read their work and claimed that the Rhodes must Fall crowd had probably never heard of them - which makes me wonder how seriously he has engaged with the other side of the argument as these authors essentially wrote the foundational texts in this area and their work will inevitably come up in any conversation among excitable woke undergraduates on this topic. I would recommend reading Orientalism BTW. It's a bit boring and long-winded but compared to this Lord Sumption piece it's the Gettysburg Address. Said was a Palestinian and on a day when the Israeli finance minister has allegedly called for a Palestinian village to be wiped out his attack on colonialism and the colonialist mindset seems as relevant as ever.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
Scientific publishing has outlived its usefulness. Journals should go.
arXivs & open journals are way cheaper and can be run by the scientific communities themselves. That gets most of the 10 per cent of the budget back for research immediately.
I think the advantages of peer-review are over-stated.
The only reason for rejecting a paper is if it is demonstrably wrong. Actually, very, very few papers fall into that category.
Many scientific papers are demonstrably uninteresting (what fraction of papers never get cited?). But, I would hesitate to say a paper should be rejected as it is very boring.
If the costs of publishing are substantially reduced, I have no problem with tedious papers being available electronically.
It is like pb.com -- I have no problem with tedious, uninteresting posts (and who am I to say a poster is tedious anyhow, maybe it is my fault, maybe my interests are narrow).
Something to be said for that - and as the recent availability of online preprints showed, it's pretty clear soon enough which papers are deserving of attention. Unfettered access might also mean it's a lot easier to spot fraud and data manipulation.
Though the world is still impressed, rightly or not, by publication in the prestige journals. And in some sense they do still provide, however imperfectly, a fairly strong quality filter. Which saves time. It is a scam, but it's not entirely without purpose.
We are in perfect agreement on this ... if not on the damn War
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
And as for the headline 10% figure, it's much lower across research funding in general, outwith QR, I should think. In my recent grants, publication costs have been around 2%, though that would vary a lot by field. Data costs are high for me, can be 20% or more of funding, which inflates the denominator.
It is not the publication costs of the articles.
It is the subscription cost your Department is paying for electronic access to the Journals. How much is that?
10 years old, but this is still a good (& free) article:
The final sentences sums it up: By and large, the problem does not arise from outright fraud, which is rare. It arises from official pressure to publish when you have nothing to say.
Yep, I'm conflating two different things, good point.
Whoa, that was a long read. Tldr; Posh white bloke says it's wrong to blame posh white blokes for everything and absurd to wonder if non posh non white non blokes have been unfairly treated by traditional historical scholarship. MRDA. I particularly liked the bit where he mansplained Edward Said and Foucault as if he was the first person to have ever read their work and claimed that the Rhodes must Fall crowd had probably never heard of them - which makes me wonder how seriously he has engaged with the other side of the argument as these authors essentially wrote the foundational texts in this area and their work will inevitably come up in any conversation among excitable woke undergraduates on this topic. I would recommend reading Orientalism BTW. It's a bit boring and long-winded but compared to this Lord Sumption piece it's the Gettysburg Address. Said was a Palestinian and on a day when the Israeli finance minister has allegedly called for a Palestinian village to be wiped out his attack on colonialism and the colonialist mindset seems as relevant as ever.
It's the usual Sumption article - he's written the thing so many times, he must have a travesty generator working off one article to create new ones.
The whole "post truth" thing has been terribly misused, though. I recall an anguished article from some philosophers denying that "there is no such thing as truth" meant what Trump (and some Trumpets) had turned it into. i.e. Straight up lies are valid because "I want them to be true".
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Many many years ago I spent some time teaching programmers and analysts some basic accounting. Copying 'I'm sorry I'll read that again' and a well known company who used to teach this stuff I made up stories with silly names. My favourite creation was a bad debt problem where William Yardque was buying snooker balls from his Russian supplier Inoff the Red, but got purple balls the size of footballs delivered instead.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
That sounds a lot more funky than our lecturer was! No room for comedy with him.
Oh I've got loads more where they came from:
The lorry driver Art Ticulatedlorry
The Post office worker Penelope Stamp
And of course there are the old favourites that start with a 'Sir' - The drunk doctor Sir Irrhosistheliver and the newspaper baron Sir Culation.
What about the Accountant who got a Budgie and called it 'Ted Profit'?
Whoa, that was a long read. Tldr; Posh white bloke says it's wrong to blame posh white blokes for everything and absurd to wonder if non posh non white non blokes have been unfairly treated by traditional historical scholarship. MRDA. I particularly liked the bit where he mansplained Edward Said and Foucault as if he was the first person to have ever read their work and claimed that the Rhodes must Fall crowd had probably never heard of them - which makes me wonder how seriously he has engaged with the other side of the argument as these authors essentially wrote the foundational texts in this area and their work will inevitably come up in any conversation among excitable woke undergraduates on this topic. I would recommend reading Orientalism BTW. It's a bit boring and long-winded but compared to this Lord Sumption piece it's the Gettysburg Address. Said was a Palestinian and on a day when the Israeli finance minister has allegedly called for a Palestinian village to be wiped out his attack on colonialism and the colonialist mindset seems as relevant as ever.
It's the usual Sumption article - he's written the thing so many times, he must have a travesty generator working off one article to create new ones.
The whole "post truth" thing has been terribly misused, though. I recall an anguished article from some philosophers denying that "there is no such thing as truth" meant what Trump (and some Trumpets) had turned it into. i.e. Straight up lies are valid because "I want them to be true".
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Oooh, fight! Fight!
I can't think of many posts that don't accept the 'fog of war' is real; indeed, I think many people on here thoroughly accept that. But that doesn't mean we can't link to things we see, even if they are partly fog-covered.
I also don't see anyone who expects it to be "resolved in 24-hr rolling news time".
"that we will win because we must win"
My own view is slightly different: we must give Ukraine all the help they need to win, because letting Russia win will create even more problems down the line. Now, that might be because I'm a 'scared idiot', or it might be because I've studied the bleedin' obvious from historical geopolitical conflicts.
Define "all the help they need to win".
If I was to say: "F16 block XV jets, ATACMS type 76 and Type XX destroyers," we'd both know I was bullshitting. firstly because we both know I don't have that sort of in-depth knowledge, and secondly because I don't think they exist.
But exactly that: whatever it takes, short of nukes, to help Ukraine to win.
Now, I know you're going to nitpick on that, but as a broad principle I think it's sound. If Ukraine don't 'win' (*) now, then we're going to have to do more elsewhere in the future. Do you disagree with that?
(*) For however you define 'win'.
So you'd advocate seconding our entire army, navy and air force to the conflict, to bolster the Ukrainians maximally in conventional warfare?
Possibly, yes - though I don't think it would get that far. We have spent the last year slowly creeping up our support, and Ukrainians have been dying.
But let me throw it back to you: what would you do?
Instinctively the current package seems about right, but I'm so far away from being an expert in such matters I try to refrain from commenting. A strategy I'd gently recommend to you.
LOL. A poster on here has a list of things he hates seeing on PB, and 'IANAE' is one of them. Something I often use. You might also notice that I quite like using other caveats. All I'm trying to do is make sense of complex situations.
Can you give us a list of everything that you are an expert in so we can discount your posts on other matters?
There are one or two folk on PB (not referring to Anabob here, I hasten to add) for whom it would be quicker to provide a self-determined list of what they are not experts in.
Double entry bookkeeping. It changed my life. I feel genuinely sorry for people who haven't been privileged to study it. When the penny drops ... boy it's a whole new world.
Many many years ago I spent some time teaching programmers and analysts some basic accounting. Copying 'I'm sorry I'll read that again' and a well known company who used to teach this stuff I made up stories with silly names. My favourite creation was a bad debt problem where William Yardque was buying snooker balls from his Russian supplier Inoff the Red, but got purple balls the size of footballs delivered instead.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
That sounds a lot more funky than our lecturer was! No room for comedy with him.
Oh I've got loads more where they came from:
The lorry driver Art Ticulatedlorry
The Post office worker Penelope Stamp
And of course there are the old favourites that start with a 'Sir' - The drunk doctor Sir Irrhosistheliver and the newspaper baron Sir Culation.
Do I get a like every time I come up with some new ones because I could carry on doing this for years.
@kinabalu I once came across a set of books that made no sense whatsoever. Every transaction just seemed so wrong. It then dawned on me that the person had used a Cr when it should be a Dr and a Dr when it should be a Cr. The book keeping was in fact absolutely perfect. I presumed she had never been trained, which made it even more impressive that it was faultless.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
And as for the headline 10% figure, it's much lower across research funding in general, outwith QR, I should think. In my recent grants, publication costs have been around 2%, though that would vary a lot by field. Data costs are high for me, can be 20% or more of funding, which inflates the denominator.
It is not the publication costs of the articles.
It is the subscription cost your Department is paying for electronic access to the Journals. How much is that?
10 years old, but this is still a good (& free) article:
The final sentences sums it up: By and large, the problem does not arise from outright fraud, which is rare. It arises from official pressure to publish when you have nothing to say.
Yep, I'm conflating two different things, good point.
Though fraud and essentially empty articles will cross over.....
I recall one chap who was very active in high temp superconductors, who published paper after paper. Slightly twiddling the formula and copy pasting the data into the graphs etc. The papers looked identical - the results were genuine. Probably.
In the entire system, is there much of an incentive not to publish more volume? Quality be damned?
- Every academic is in a desperate race to publish. And are judged very often on numbers not quality. - The journals are increasing in number and need content.
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
And as for the headline 10% figure, it's much lower across research funding in general, outwith QR, I should think. In my recent grants, publication costs have been around 2%, though that would vary a lot by field. Data costs are high for me, can be 20% or more of funding, which inflates the denominator.
It is not the publication costs of the articles.
It is the subscription cost your Department is paying for electronic access to the Journals. How much is that?
10 years old, but this is still a good (& free) article:
The final sentences sums it up: By and large, the problem does not arise from outright fraud, which is rare. It arises from official pressure to publish when you have nothing to say.
Fun fact: One of the main culprits was the Bouncing Czech, Robert Maxwell:
Whoa, that was a long read. Tldr; Posh white bloke says it's wrong to blame posh white blokes for everything and absurd to wonder if non posh non white non blokes have been unfairly treated by traditional historical scholarship. MRDA. I particularly liked the bit where he mansplained Edward Said and Foucault as if he was the first person to have ever read their work and claimed that the Rhodes must Fall crowd had probably never heard of them - which makes me wonder how seriously he has engaged with the other side of the argument as these authors essentially wrote the foundational texts in this area and their work will inevitably come up in any conversation among excitable woke undergraduates on this topic. I would recommend reading Orientalism BTW. It's a bit boring and long-winded but compared to this Lord Sumption piece it's the Gettysburg Address. Said was a Palestinian and on a day when the Israeli finance minister has allegedly called for a Palestinian village to be wiped out his attack on colonialism and the colonialist mindset seems as relevant as ever.
It's the usual Sumption article - he's written the thing so many times, he must have a travesty generator working off one article to create new ones.
The whole "post truth" thing has been terribly misused, though. I recall an anguished article from some philosophers denying that "there is no such thing as truth" meant what Trump (and some Trumpets) had turned it into. i.e. Straight up lies are valid because "I want them to be true".
Nothing worse than a historian turned lawyer.
Much has been gained by people moving from one profession to another and seeing new things. About 0.0001% of the time, though.
The rest of the time the members of the later profession are holding their heads, screaming "That was proved wrong in 1576"
Judging from this week's Economist academia (it has 3 pages on science papers) is a corrupt and corrupting mess.
On one specific: "There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers" that is something I have seen and is sometimes easily explained. Take breathing or heart rate for example, few nurses time for a whole minute. If you time for 30 seconds, you always get an even number per minute.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
[post was too long for one post] Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
My proposal is not to give more money to Elsevier et al, but to actually pay peer reviewers and the unpaid members of editorial boards. Would be better to do this directly, somehow, rather than through publishers (the quoted part of my post was badly phrased to get this across, I'll admit)
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
And as for the headline 10% figure, it's much lower across research funding in general, outwith QR, I should think. In my recent grants, publication costs have been around 2%, though that would vary a lot by field. Data costs are high for me, can be 20% or more of funding, which inflates the denominator.
It is not the publication costs of the articles.
It is the subscription cost your Department is paying for electronic access to the Journals. How much is that?
10 years old, but this is still a good (& free) article:
The final sentences sums it up: By and large, the problem does not arise from outright fraud, which is rare. It arises from official pressure to publish when you have nothing to say.
Yep, I'm conflating two different things, good point.
Though fraud and essentially empty articles will cross over.....
I recall one chap who was very active in high temp superconductors, who published paper after paper. Slightly twiddling the formula and copy pasting the data into the graphs etc. The papers looked identical - the results were genuine. Probably.
In the entire system, is there much of an incentive not to publish more volume? Quality be damned?
- Every academic is in a desperate race to publish. And are judged very often on numbers not quality. - The journals are increasing in number and need content.
I worked with some researchers who were shifting their simulations from 32bit to 64bit processors. Ever so slight differences in the results of their models. Which led to being able to pretty much re-publish existing work with the differing output and write a paper on their findings on the CPU differences.
Just catching up, via the recently-discovered "notifications" on a week-old thread. About whether having military experience gives any insight into geopolitical conflicts the like of which we are seeing now.
Of course it doesn't. It does mean that I can look at an area weapon strike and cast my eyes to the ceiling as everyone pronounces that the damage came from hand held anti-tank weapons yes sure, but more broadly at theatre level then not at all.
My inestimable expertise comes from studying the bleedin' obvious, from historical geopolitical conflicts, and from accepting that the fog of war is real and this one won't be resolved in 24-hr rolling news time.
I also call out comments which display absurd historical determinism or say, one way or another, that we will win because we must win, these latter usually made by scared idiots on here who hope that if they shout something loud enough the bad man will go away.
Anyway, good weekend everyone, I trust.
Good post. The PB Toy Soldiers are a particularly unfunny joke. The worst thing about this site.
No, your self appointed role as PB style guardian wins that honour.
Beyond tedious.
I was tempted to add your misogynistic garbage about dockside sex workers to the list but it's so far beyond the pale it would have served only to trivialise it.
You are such a misogynist, your brain automatically assumes hookers have to be women.
Most of the sex workers I have encountered in my life are males.
"Patricia, once you've had a lover robot, you'll never want a real man... again!"
Comments
This is also true of averages and the different things this can mean to a statistician.
Clarity and simplicity always help. But of course not always what those communicating want.
If I read something in the FT about CFR or IFR that says "0.04" I'd wonder why they left the % sign off. And only after that would I start to think that they might be writing it out of 1.
There is though, undoubtedly, a problem. More so in some countries (e.g. see the Economist's table) where promotions etc are very metric based. However, getting ahead in academia requires a few things, in varying quantities: funding, papers and profile (being good enough in two can outweigh the other; potentially even doing very well in one might be enough). Universities are rational and will want to recruit and retain (i.e. offer promotion/higher pay) to those who bring in funding (great for university) have a high profile (brings some prestige, can also bring in undergrads and postgrads who have heard of the person and want to study under them) or have lots of highly cited papers (also some prestige in the field, even if little known to public).
This leads to some perverse incentives. Funders want a track record of successful projects, so there's an awful lot of pressure to 'succeed' with pretty much all funding. Universities can also be guilty of this - I know of a primary investigator who is trying to pull out of a funded study as they believe, having got deeper into it, that it is deeply scientifically flawed. Their university is applying pressure to continue (and potentially looking for alternative PIs to keep the funding). High profile can nowadays mean talking head or big Twitter following, which can lead to people pushing controversial ideas that some influential people want to hear (a prominent academic from North America comes to mind) or also, potentially, fund. The publication metrics push making extravagant or controversial claims in papers, even if not supported by the evidence. All of that falls short of fraud, but can reduce quality of science.
Our promotions criteria are based mostly on the above, there's no direct mention of upholding research ethics for example, no brownie points for whistleblowing or identifying a fraudulent study elsewhere. There are also issues around limited time for editorial boards and lack of time for peer review, which is - of course - not paid and also not something that's really reflected in promotion criteria. When I review a paper, I assess it on what is written and take the results as true - there's not time for any deeper delving (I have however on occasion found inconsistent results, although I've assumed error rather than fraud).
There is some crap science, nevermind the fraudulent. Part of this is fuelled by junk journals (related to open access publishing, where the incentive is for journals to publish to get paid, rather than attract paying readers by reputation - I am in favour of open access, but this is a real issue - if you have money, you can publish anything somewhere).
Having said all the above, I work with people whom I believe to be fiercely committed to doing a good job and trying to generate the most robust evidence they can to provide answers to important questions. I see people making decisions on a regular basis that reduce the potential impact of their work due to not pushing findings beyond what the evidence supports. There is the odd high-profile jackass. Unfortunately, they can be in positions where there is vested interest in not questioning too closely what they are doing (in relation to, perhaps deliberately, designing studies poorly which results in a particular outcome or in cutting corners here or there). Universities play a role in perhaps being reluctant to question their research funding golden gooses and journals need to be better funded and do a better job on peer review. The last probably requires payment of peer reviewers, either directly from journals or with a ring-fenced amount of an academic role being dedicated to peer review.
In an example day book page one of the sales or purchase entries was to N. N. Try.
I could now go on and list hundreds of these. I spent more time thinking these up and then matching like ones together with a relevant story than I did creating the course.
Couple more:
Write off of stock due to IRA explosion involved Dick O'Stynamite
Terry Dactil goes well with Dina Saw for a story involving fossils.
Not sure the same is true of Trump, so apologies for bracketing you with him in this connection.
BREAKING: Only 664 producers of an expected 4500 have signed the @Circ_Scotland producers agreement.
While that’s reportedly 90% of containers covered that’s an awful lot of suppliers who are going to stop selling in Scotland.
Most of the sex workers I have encountered in my life are males.
"The death of historical truth
The New Roundheads can't see beyond race"
https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-death-of-historical-truth/
https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/21548936/harry-meghan-evicted-frogmore-cottage-king-charles/
What ?!! 6£!£9^%@$!£%
Higher Education funding councils, such as HEFCE in England and HEFCW in Wales, award funding (the QR funding) in a manner determined by the quality of research going on in each department as judged by various (semi-bogus) research assessment exercises.
What fraction of this research money goes on Journals?
The answer is 10 per cent. 10 per cent of all QR funding is given to Journals in subscriptions, etc.
How much more of the science budget do you want to hand over to Journals?
There is little enough money in science research these days for us to be paying a tithe to Elsevier, OUP, Wiley, etc.
Scientific publishing is literally one of the biggest scams. It is a racket on a truly impressive scale.
There is way, way too much money going into it (especially as almost all the work is done unpaid by academics).
Solicitor Alvin Just sent 'inappropriate and unprofessional' emails to barrister Philip Noble after clashing during a will dispute at Central London County Court in 2017.
He told Mr Noble: 'You are just fading away one step closer to your grave...I will not lose any sleep for your nonsense, as I know the plagues will fall on you just like Pharaoh.'
Mr Just also added that the barrister reminded him of 'a Grade 7 bully' that he 'had to slam to the ground'.
Messages were sent to Mr Noble's client as well, warning: 'Your judgement is coming soon beware, and it will not be an easy one, the Most High knows that.. Just remember that whosoever diggeth a pit shall fall in it.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11801885/Christian-lawyer-called-biblical-curses-rival-barrister-struck-off.html
Publishing is in a mess (not from the publishers' POV) at the moment because science is both paying the old publishers for access to the back catalogues of research and paying the old and new publishers to publish new research.
There are now some excellent new journals that are based at univerisities or within academic networks (really within academic networks, rather than 'the journal of hte European Society of X, published by SAGE", that are run at cost. One of my favourites gets rid of all the pre-submission journal specific formatting nonsense. You upload a word doc or PDF, it goes through peer review and you only have to do all the journal specific stuff after it's been accepted.
There'd be a whole industry of fact checkers on it like a tramp on chips.
It is a hugely popular move from the King to cut down expenses on the most unpopular royals, neither of whom are working royals now anyway
The lorry driver Art Ticulatedlorry
The Post office worker Penelope Stamp
And of course there are the old favourites that start with a 'Sir' - The drunk doctor Sir Irrhosistheliver and the newspaper baron Sir Culation.
SNP will now have a livestream for this evening's hustings. Aren't you all so lucky!
https://twitter.com/deanmthomson/status/1630958581200633857
arXivs & open journals are way cheaper and can be run by the scientific communities themselves. That gets most of the 10 per cent of the budget back for research immediately.
I think the advantages of peer-review are over-stated.
The only reason for rejecting a paper is if it is demonstrably wrong. Actually, very, very few papers fall into that category.
Many scientific papers are demonstrably uninteresting (what fraction of papers never get cited?). But, I would hesitate to say a paper should be rejected as it is very boring.
If the costs of publishing are substantially reduced, I have no problem with tedious papers being available electronically.
It is like pb.com -- I have no problem with tedious, uninteresting posts (and who am I to say a poster is tedious anyhow, maybe it is my fault, maybe my interests are narrow).
Leon would also love it!
What I mean, though, is that double entry is a no bullshit proper discipline. It's a craft. The white collar equivalent of something like dry stone walling. When you apply the ancient but never bettered techniques to turn a load of messy info into something correct and perfectly balanced you feel a satisfaction you don't get from the things you end up doing in 'management'. I was happy doing grunt accounting, then became unhappy when I 'rose' to consulting and all of that nonsense, despite it being better paid and higher status, and only became happy again when I fell into bond trading - another 'no bullshit' activity.
Of course, someone could try and replace Excel with a spreadsheet with Python underneath... https://www.resolversystems.com
It is the subscription cost your Department is paying for electronic access to the Journals. How much is that?
10 years old, but this is still a good (& free) article:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/sep/05/publish-perish-peer-review-science
The final sentences sums it up: By and large, the problem does not arise from outright fraud, which is rare. It arises from official pressure to publish when you have nothing to say.
I agree that boring stuff should get published. Non-results are also very important, particularly when collating papers for a systematic review. Yet we still go for the established high profile journals that will reject non results as that gives us the potential still for greatest reach (and citations) and wins brownie points for progression etc.
Unfettered access might also mean it's a lot easier to spot fraud and data manipulation.
Though the world is still impressed, rightly or not, by publication in the prestige journals. And in some sense they do still provide, however imperfectly, a fairly strong quality filter. Which saves time.
It is a scam, but it's not entirely without purpose.
I particularly liked the bit where he mansplained Edward Said and Foucault as if he was the first person to have ever read their work and claimed that the Rhodes must Fall crowd had probably never heard of them - which makes me wonder how seriously he has engaged with the other side of the argument as these authors essentially wrote the foundational texts in this area and their work will inevitably come up in any conversation among excitable woke undergraduates on this topic.
I would recommend reading Orientalism BTW. It's a bit boring and long-winded but compared to this Lord Sumption piece it's the Gettysburg Address. Said was a Palestinian and on a day when the Israeli finance minister has allegedly called for a Palestinian village to be wiped out his attack on colonialism and the colonialist mindset seems as relevant as ever.
The whole "post truth" thing has been terribly misused, though. I recall an anguished article from some philosophers denying that "there is no such thing as truth" meant what Trump (and some Trumpets) had turned it into. i.e. Straight up lies are valid because "I want them to be true".
@kinabalu I once came across a set of books that made no sense whatsoever. Every transaction just seemed so wrong. It then dawned on me that the person had used a Cr when it should be a Dr and a Dr when it should be a Cr. The book keeping was in fact absolutely perfect. I presumed she had never been trained, which made it even more impressive that it was faultless.
I recall one chap who was very active in high temp superconductors, who published paper after paper. Slightly twiddling the formula and copy pasting the data into the graphs etc. The papers looked identical - the results were genuine. Probably.
In the entire system, is there much of an incentive not to publish more volume? Quality be damned?
- Every academic is in a desperate race to publish. And are judged very often on numbers not quality.
- The journals are increasing in number and need content.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
Some things really should be left on a monastic basis of frugality.
The CIA has confirmed that this thread is dead
The rest of the time the members of the later profession are holding their heads, screaming "That was proved wrong in 1576"
Win win!