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Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader processes of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.

Modern science originated from an attempt to weed out such subjective lapses

Our individual responses to the conclusions that science reaches, however, are quite another matter. Ironically, in part because researchers employ so much nuance and strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation.

We’re not here to defend peer review against its many critics. We have the same feelings about it that Churchill did about democracy, aka the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Of course, a good number of the retractions we write about are due to misconduct, and it’s not clear how peer review, no matter how good, would detect out-and-out fraud.

With that in mind, a paper published last week in the Annals of Emergency Medicine caught our eye. Over 14 years, 84 editors at the journal rated close to 15,000 reviews by about 1,500 reviewers. Highlights of their findings: …92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision), at rates unrelated to the length of their service (but moderately correlated with their mean quality score, with better-than average reviewers decreasing at about half the rate of those below average). Only 8% improved, and those by very small amount.

The average reviewer in our study would have taken 12.5 years to reach this threshold; only 3% of reviewers whose quality decreased would have reached it in less than 5 years, and even the worst would take 3.2 years. Another 35% of all reviewers would reach the threshold in 5 to 10 years, 28% in 10 to 15 years, 12% in 15 to 20 years, and 22% in 20 years or more. So the decline was slow. Still, the results, note the authors, were surprising: Such a negative overall trend is contrary to most editors’ and reviewers’ intuitive expectations and beliefs about reviewer skills and the benefits of experience.

The discovery that Android devices - which are quickly becoming the best-selling products in the smartphone space - also collect location data indicates how essential such information has become to their effective operation. "Location services", which can help place a user on a map, are increasingly seen as important for providing enhanced services including advertising - which forms the basis of Google's business.

Smartphones running Google's Android software collect data about the user's movements in almost exactly the same way as the iPhone, according to an examination of files they contain. The discovery, made by a Swedish researcher, comes as the Democratic senator Al Franken has written to Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why iPhones keep a secret file recording the location of their users as they move around, as the Guardian revealed this week.

Magnus Eriksson, a Swedish programmer, has shown that Android phones – now the bestselling smartphones – do the same, though for a shorter period. According to files discovered by Android devices keep a record of the locations and unique IDs of the last 50 mobile masts that it has communicated with, and the last 200 Wi-Fi networks that it has "seen". These are overwritten, oldest first, when the relevant list is full. It is not yet known whether the lists are sent to Google. That differs from Apple, where the data is stored for up to a year.

1. One cannot criticise if one has not read the articleMr Singh said that between the reporter (Ms Sim) and himself, they had received 7 email complaints, with many more criticisms online. However, he said that most of these complaints had come from people who were reacting solely to the front page without reading the article. Mr Singh said that he had expected most intelligent and educated Singaporeans to have read the article before jumping the gun to judge TNP for their article.

2. "Are Singaporeans ready for a gay MP?" was the angle TNP chose to take because they thought it was an important issue concerning votersEven though the PAP said that Dr Wijeysingha's sexual orientation was not an issue for them, TNP felt that it was an issue for Singaporean voters. They therefore went out to poll Singaporeans about whether they were ready for a gay MP. 76% of the Singaporeans polled said that they would be fine with a gay MP. This, Mr Singh said, actually helps SDP more than the PAP, and therefore he felt that it was quite "ballsy" of TNP to have taken this angle. However, TNP only polled approx. 130 (I forget the real number) people and so it would not have been statistically correct for the headline to say "Singaporeans are ready for a gay MP". (This was in response to my question about why the headline could not have reflected the poll.) He also said that TNP decided to do a poll about lowering the age of consent in Singapore because it was an issue raised in the video (albeit not by Dr Wijeysingha) and they felt that it was relevant to Singaporeans. 

3. It is only a smear campaign if what the PAP say about Vincent Wijeysingha is untrue Mr Singh said that it would only be accurate to say that the PAP has launched a "smear campaign" against Dr Wijeysingha if what they are saying is untrue. However, what the PAP has said is true, and so it cannot be labelled a "smear campaign".He said that he had asked the SDP if they had attempted to suppress the video in question, and that the SDP said yes. So the PAP hadn't been "smearing" the SDP by implying they were trying to suppress the video, because they were

The history of Western moral philosophy includes numerous attempts to ground ethics in one rational principle, standard, or rule. This narrative stretches back 2,500 years to the Greeks, who were interested mainly in virtue ethics and the moral character of the person. The modern era has seen two major additions. In 1785, Immanuel Kant introduced the categorical imperative: act only under the assumption that what you do could be made into a universal law. And in 1789, Jeremy Bentham proposed utilitarianism: work toward the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people (the “utility” principle).

Many people now think projects to build a reasonable and coherent moral system are doomed. Still, most secular and religious people reject the alternative of moral relativism, and have spent much ink criticizing it (among my favorite books on the topic is Moral Relativism by Stephen Lukes). The most recent and controversial work in this area comes from Sam Harris. In The Moral Landscape, Harris argues for a morality based on (a science of) well-being and flourishing, rather than religious dogma.

I am interested in another oft-heard criticism of Harris’ book, which is that words like “well-being” and “flourishing” are too general to form any relevant basis for morality. This criticism has some force to it, as these certainly are somewhat vague terms. But what if “well-being” and “flourishing” were to be used only as a starting point for a moral framework? These concepts would still put us on a better grounding than religious faith. But they cannot stand alone. Nor do they need to.

As a verbal artifact, farmed content exhibits neither style nor substance.

The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.

These prose-widgets are not hammered out by robots, surprisingly. But they are written by writers who work like robots. As recent accounts of life in these words-are-money mills make clear, some content-farm writers have deadlines as frequently as every 25 minutes. Others are expected to turn around reported pieces, containing interviews with several experts, in an hour. Some compose, edit, format and publish 10 articles in a single shift. Many with decades of experience in journalism work 70-hour weeks for salaries of $40,000 with no vacation time. The content farms have taken journalism hackwork to a whole new level.

ost disclosure statements are not designed to be read; they are designed to be clicked on. But some companies actually want their customers to read and understand the statements. They don’t want customers who might sue, and, just in case, they want to be able to prove that the customers did understand the risks. So the leaders in disclosure statements right now tend to be financial and health-care companies – and also space-travel and extreme-sports vendors. They sincerely want to let their customers know what they are getting into, because a regretful customer is a vengeful one. That means making disclosure statements readable. I would suggest turning them into a quiz. The user would not simply click a single button, but would have to select the right button for each question. For example: What are my chances of dying in space? A) 5% B) 30% C) 1-4% (the correct answer, based on experience so far; current spacecraft are believed to be safer.) Now imagine: Who can see my data? A) I can. B) XYZ Corporation. C) XYZ Corporation’s marketing partners. (Click here to see the list.) D) XYZ Corporation’s affiliates and anyone it chooses. As the customer picks answers, she gets a good idea of what is going on. In fact, if you're a marketer, why not dispense with a single right answer and let the consumer specify what she wants to have happen with her data (and corresponding privileges/access rights if necessary)? That’s much more useful than vague policy statements. Suddenly, the disclosure statement becomes a consumer application that adds value to the vendor-consumer relationship.

And show the data themselves rather than a description.

this is all very easy if you are the site with which the user communicates directly; it is more difficult if you are in the background, a third party collecting information surreptitiously. But that practice should be stopped, anyway.