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Internet surveys sometimes acknowledge how unscientific (read: meaningless) they really are. They surely must be a pale imitation of the rigorous, carefully sampled, thoroughly transparent polls favored by political savants and mainstream news organizations

The line between junk and credible polling remains. But it became a little blurrier — creating concern among professional survey organizations and reason for greater skepticism by all of us — because of charges this week that one widely cited pollster may have fabricated data or manipulated it so seriously as to render it meaningless.

founder of the left-leaning Daily Kos website, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Oakland on Wednesday charging that Research 2000, the organization he had commissioned for 1 1/2 years to test voter opinion, had doctored its results.

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell's workstation.)

Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

“It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

Forget about trying to catch doping. It’s a game the “good guys” can never win. Stop testing at all, and declare open season. Treat doping as just something else that the sportsmen can do to improve their performance, much the same as spending money on a good bike isn’t considered cheating.

Curious on what motivates you to draw the line of acceptability after a vigorous diet and exercise regime, nutritional supplements, a pro trainer, and other measures specifically designed to manipulate the body for enhanced athletic performance, but before PEDs.

if you think that the reasons you have for thinking that there are fairies are very poor reasons. That it's irrational to think that there are such things, then belief in supernatural agencies in general is irrational... [Agnostics] fall foul of this picture...

we're all familiar with Popper's dictum that if a theory, a claim explains everything, if everything is consistent with the truth of the claim, then it's empty. It doesn't explain anything at all. [On the claim that Science purports to explain everything, or that it claims that it will be able to eventually] I don't think Science does claim that at all, in fact. Science at its normal best: it is a public, a testable, a challengeable project. Always having to maintain its own respectability by saying what would count as counter-evidence against it. And when people put forward views in Science, they publish them so that other people can test them, review them, try to replicate results, and I think that is absolutely the model of how an epistemology should proceed. Out there in the open and inviting the very toughest kind of response from other people...

[On the claim that there is no morality without God] In classical antiquity, in the Classical Tradition, there are deep, rich, powerful thoughts about the nature of morality, the foundations of ethics. The nature of the good life, which make no appeal whatever to any divine command. Or any government via this sort of spirit monarch in disguise, who will reward you if you do what he or she requires, and punish you if you don't. All the very best and deepest thinking about ethics has come from non-religious traditions...

cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic’s Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by “Invisible Flan”.

And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best’s Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It’s almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot. Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. T

Nano Nonsense and Cryonics goes for the nitty-gritty right away in the opening paragraph:To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.This sounds convincing, but doesn’t address what cryonicists actually claim. Ben Best, President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, replies in the comments:Strawberries (and mammalian tissues) are not turned to mush by freezing because water expands and crystallizes inside the cells. Water crystallizes in the extracellular space because more nucleators are found extracellularly. As water crystallizes in the extracellular space, the extracellular salt concentration increases causing cells to lose water osmotically and shrink. Ultimately the cell membranes are broken by crushing from extracellular ice and/or high extracellular salt concentration. […] Cryonics organizations use vitrification perfusion before cooling to cryogenic temperatures. With good brain perfusion, vitrification can reduce ice formation to negligible amounts.

On paper, Singaporean education is great. Our universities are in the Top 200 in the Times Higher Education list. We win Olympiads all the time. When it comes to knowing a basic inventory of facts, Singaporean education is just about the best you can get. And that is a fact.

So what’s missing?

Singapore is a true melting pot. In the past, as is today, and as will be tomorrow, many cultures came together into one. It has been lauded as one of Singapore’s big selling points – an eclectic fusion of Orient and Occident, a quaint East-meets-West mixture which happens to work. But have we taken this metaphor and looked at it from another perspective? Many cultures came together under the band of meritocracy – may the best rule, and may they rule with wisdom. And since they are the best, they are paid the best money one can get too. This is the fire which managed to melt, or should i say meld East and West into a functioning whole. And since we are such fans of meritocracy, society has been geared in that direction too. This melting pot which is Singapore has had certain repercussions, which the post I have linked to above shows. It seems that in developing the concept of meritocracy, what “The Best” is was artificially defined. And in artificially defining something, you create an artificial standard to compare everything against. In doing so, everything else becomes irrelevant. It creates a strong tendency towards conformity, which is the negative result of the melting pot. The individual loses his/her uniqueness and becomes part of this stew of uniformity. In school, you are told to study hard, you are told what you have to study, without any care as to what you actually think.

Michael Hor noted that despite the vocal attempts to demonise gay people and paint homosexual orientation as injurious (including by some members of the ruling party) the government did not subscribe to such reasoning. Yet the government chose to keep the law.

The “key speech arguing for the retention of 377A” that Hor refers to was that made by Thio. Hor then goes on to discover that the government’s decision was bi-layered. The surface justification, going by the prime minister’s words, was that it would be symbolic — a “signpost of heterosexual orthodoxy”. Hor next asks what the motivation might be for wanting such a symbol. He examines the possibility that it could be to steer people towards heterosexual orientation, yet the government itself, from its own words, does not believe so.

As was well-known, the anti-gay movement was religiously inspired. The government however was neither dictated nor swayed by them, Hor said. In fact, the government “roundly rejected” the movement’s essential beliefs. Still, it appears that the government did not want to annoy them any further by leaving them empty-handed. That motivation alone made the government decide to retain 377A.

University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

Vipul Bhrigu, a former postdoc at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center, wears a dark-blue three-buttoned suit and a pinched expression as he cups his pregnant wife's hand in both of his. When Pollard Hines calls Bhrigu's case to order, she has stern words for him: "I was inclined to send you to jail when I came out here this morning."

Bhrigu, over the course of several months at Michigan, had meticulously and systematically sabotaged the work of Heather Ames, a graduate student in his lab, by tampering with her experiments and poisoning her cell-culture media. Captured on hidden camera, Bhrigu confessed to university police in April and pleaded guilty to malicious destruction of personal property, a misdemeanour that apparently usually involves cars: in the spaces for make and model on the police report, the arresting officer wrote "lab research" and "cells". Bhrigu has said on multiple occasions that he was compelled by "internal pressure" and had hoped to slow down Ames's work. Speaking earlier this month, he was contrite. "It was a complete lack of moral judgement on my part," he said.

It’s too soon to say that Twitter and Facebook destroy the mental foundations of morality, but not too soon to ask what they’re doing.

In the paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 13 people were shown documentary-style multimedia narratives designed to arouse empathy. Researchers recorded their brain activity and found that empathy is as deeply rooted in the human psyche as fear and anger.

They also noticed that empathic brain systems took an average of six to eight seconds to start up. The researchers didn’t connect this to media consumption habits, but the study’s press release fueled speculation that the Facebook generation could turn into sociopaths.

That's the title of The Atlantic profile of Dr. John Ioannidis who "has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." His 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine was on why most published research findings are false.

Ioannidis anticipated that the community might shrug off his findings: sure, a lot of dubious research makes it into journals, but we researchers and physicians know to ignore it and focus on the good stuff, so what’s the big deal? The other paper headed off that claim.

He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals.

It’s undeniable that people sometimes act in a way that benefits others, but it may seem that they always get something in return — at the very least, the satisfaction of having their desire to help fulfilled.

Contemporary discussions of altruism quickly turn to evolutionary explanations. Reciprocal altruism and kin selection are the two main theories. According to reciprocal altruism, evolution favors organisms that sacrifice their good for others in order to gain a favor in return. Kin selection — the famous “selfish gene” theory popularized by Richard Dawkins — says that an individual who behaves altruistically towards others who share its genes will tend to reproduce those genes. Organisms may be altruistic; genes are selfish. The feeling that loving your children more than yourself is hard-wired lends plausibility to the theory of kin selection.

The defect of reciprocal altruism is clear. If a person acts to benefit another in the expectation that the favor will be returned, the natural response is: “That’s not altruism!”  Pure altruism, we think, requires a person to sacrifice for another without consideration of personal gain. Doing good for another person because something’s in it for the do-er is the very opposite of what we have in mind. Kin selection does better by allowing that organisms may genuinely sacrifice their interests for another, but it fails to explain why they sometimes do so for those with whom they share no genes

Plucking out of line most of the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking men at the airport for heightened screening is no more effective at catching terrorists than randomly sampling everyone. It may even be less effective. Press stumbled across this counterintuitive concept — sometimes the best way to find something is not to weight it by probability — in the unrelated context of computational biology. The parallels to airport security struck him when a friend mentioned he was constantly being pulled out of line at the airport.

Racial profiling, in other words, doesn’t work because it devotes heightened resources to innocent people — and then devotes those resources to them repeatedly even after they’ve been cleared as innocent the first time. The actual terrorists, meanwhile, may sneak through while Transportation Security Administration agents are focusing their limited attention on the wrong passengers.

Press tested the theory in a series of probability equations (the ambitious can check his math here and here).

two disconcerting articles crossed my computer screen, both highlighting the increasingly sorry state of higher education, though from very different perspectives. The first is “Ed Dante’s” (actually a pseudonym) piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled The Shadow Scholar. The second is Gregory Petsko’s A Faustian Bargain, published of all places in Genome Biology.

There is much to be learned by educators in the Shadow Scholar piece, except the moral that “Dante” would like us to take from it. The anonymous author writes:“Pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work? Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.

The point is that plagiarism and cheating happen for a variety of reasons, one of which is the existence of people like Mr. Dante and his company, who set up a business that is clearly unethical and should be illegal. So, pointing fingers at him and his ilk is perfectly reasonable. Yes, there obviously is a “market” for cheating in higher education, and there are complex reasons for it, but he is in a position similar to that of the drug dealer who insists that he is simply providing the commodity to satisfy society’s demand. Much too easy of a way out, and one that doesn’t fly in the case of drug dealers, and shouldn’t fly in the case of ghost cheaters.

t was the big news that wasn’t. Hyperbolic claims about the possible discovery of alien life, or a second branch of life on Earth, turned out to be nothing more than bacteria that can thrive on arsenic, using it in place of phosphorus in their DNA and other molecules. But after the initial layers of hype were peeled away, even this extraordinar

This is a chronological roundup of the criticism against the science in the paper itself, ending with some personal reflections on my own handling of the story (skip to Friday, December 10th for that bit).

Thursday, December 2nd: Felisa Wolfe-Simon published a paper in Science, claiming to have found bacteria in California’s Mono Lake that can grow using arsenic instead of phosphorus. Given that phosphorus is meant to be one of six irreplaceable elements, this would have been a big deal, not least because the bacteria apparently used arsenic to build the backbones of their DNA molecules.

I have a paper in this week’s issue of Science on the cloud feedback

clouds are important regulators of the amount of energy in and out of the climate system. Clouds both reflect sunlight back to space and trap infrared radiation and keep it from escaping to space. Changes in clouds can therefore have profound impacts on our climate.

A positive cloud feedback loop posits a scenario whereby an initial warming of the planet, caused, for example, by increases in greenhouse gases, causes clouds to trap more energy and lead to further warming. Such a process amplifies the direct heating by greenhouse gases. Models have been long predicted this, but testing the models has proved difficult.

Even before I started writing Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be I knew that it would very briefly mention religion, make a mild assertion that religious questions are out of scope for science, and move on. I knew this was likely to provoke blow-back from some in the atheist community, and I knew mentioning that blow-back in my recent post “The Standard Pablum — Science and Atheism” would generate more.

Still, I was surprised by the quantity of the responses to the blog post (208 comments as of this moment, many of them substantial letters), and also by the fierceness of some of those responses. For example, according to one poster, “you not only pandered, you lied. And even if you weren’t lying, you lied.” (Several took up this “lying” theme.) Another, disappointed that my children’s book does not tell a general youth audience to look to “secular humanism for guidance,” declared  that “I’d have to tear out that page if I bought the book.”

I don’t mean to suggest that there are not points of legitimate disagreement in the mix — there are, many of them stated powerfully. There are also statements of support, vigorous debate, and (for me at least) a good deal of food for thought. I invite anyone to browse the thread, although I’d urge you to skim some of it. (The internet is after all a hyperbole-generating machine.)

The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.

Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.

"This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."