The paper’s failure as a work of statistical genetics stands in contrast to its success as a work of public outreach. If we are annoyed that a bad paper got the message across, then we should be annoyed with ourselves that we never communicated our own results properly. Here is some small attempt to rectify that:

A journal article serves many purposes. One of them is to make money for publishers. Scientists and other academics publish in scholarly journals as a credentialing mechanism and, secondarily, to tell people about their work. Journals used to be crucial for both of these reasons, but in a world where academics could just post a paper up on their own websites, the primary purpose of a journal article is its professional validation. That’s why it makes some sense that the authors of a journal article should pay for the privilege of that validation, via peer review, rather than readers paying for the privilege of reading.

Talks about PLOS NULL to publish all null science findings.

Not secret in most of these works is the disdain for metaphysical evil, which is regarded as an antiquated concept that's done more harm than good. They argue that the time has come to replace such metaphysical terms with physical explanations—malfunctions or malformations in the brain.

The "Brain Overclaim" paper by Stephen Morse of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Neuroscience and Society is a tongue-in-cheek "diagnostic note" on the grandiosity of the assumptions of the brain-book fad, mainly concerned about the way they have been creeping into jurisprudence

Statistics is social work for science

I have been saying this for YEARS, FOR YEARS!!!!!!

Now we have had two years in which Democrats, with cherished ideological objectives of their own, have been fully in charge of Washington. Given what has taken place, can the president really claim that his is the party that values facts and science and argument above all?

"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now," Obama recently explained, "and facts and science and argument (do) not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared."

Me - But scientists don't always do a good job in their quest for truth, they seem to think its necessary to leverage fear to keep themselves in business and hype their work and relevance. Your arguments might seem sophisticated but they are frequently wrong Mr. President, thats why you aren't winning the day.

If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable.

Me - "Absolutely necessary to do a similar study into climate science research"

Comment to look up - american scientist is the magazine publication of Sigma Xi.

In the early days of AGW there was paper reviewed in "American Scientist" where they were describing methodologies for detecting global warming. In the body of the article, they admitted, though not directly, that their looked for effect was 3 orders of magnitude smaller than their reported margin of error. You would never have gotten that information from the executive summary.

This sounds like a good book. The nature of the epistemological problem of using models/data/simulations to know science requires for this very reason that there be excellent peer review systems for both the statistical tools and code used in the research process. Criticism aimed at CRU is not about anyone deliberately lying about science but rather the fact that they were content and infact actively wanted to prevent robust peer review.

One such evasion concerns the science of climate change itself. The review insists that it found nothing "that might undermine the conclusions" of the 2007 IPCC report, to which the CRU was a significant contributor. But that's only because it explicitly refused to look. The review says its "concern is not with science, whether data has been validated or whether the hypotheses have survived testing," but rather with "the honesty, rigor and openness with which the CRU scientists have acted."

What exactly has been vindicated here ? No scientist deliberately lied per se, they just did a lot of shoddy work that lead to questionable results and conclusions. That east anglia doesn't think there is a more qualified and competent scientist out there to head the research team is pathetic. The culture of a research team definitely set by the top to a large extent, leaving phil jones in place is suicidal to legitimately good climate research if it exists.

supposedly supports the need for geoengineering

More evidence that journals and publishing companies are on their way out if they don't adapt to a more open source style.

She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind. In other words, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology. Alas, what she set in train earlier continues to exercise its baleful influence to this day. But the fact that she became one of the first and most prominent of "climate sceptics" has been almost entirely buried from view.

“What the women seemed to object to was not the briefness of the encounter but the fact that the man did not seem to appreciate her. The women thought this lack of gratitude implied that she did this with anybody,” Professor Campbell explained.
According to Professor Campbell, although women do not rate casual sex positively, the reason they still take part in it may be due to the menstrual cycle changes influencing their sexual motivation. Indeed, during the ovulatory phase (between days 10 to 18 of their cycle), women report increased sexual desire and arousal, with a preference for short-term partners."

Haha, I have to say I agree with the above totally. Casual encounters with man can only rewarding if he is appreciative regardless of length of the encounter.

Me - I've always maintained that regardless of biological factors, given that there can be very intelligent women out there, discrimination would and should have no basis even if on average there are more quantitatively smart men at the right end of the spectrum. How does it matter if statistically there will always be more men in some areas than others ? It should be enough to ensure opportunities are equal and there be no biases in the encouragement given to each of the sexes. Let the numbers fall where they might.

Climate change happens to be an important scientific issue, and it would be foolish to ban its discussion simply because some teachers are too unsophisticated — or too ideological — to distinguish between propaganda and an appropriate lesson plan. In fact, climate change is a model topic for teaching students the complexities and uncertainties that characterize evolving scientific theories, while introducing them to a range of opinion among scholars — from MIT's Richard S. Lindzen to NASA's James Hansen — as well as the "consensus" view represented by the scandal-plagued Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Students could examine a phenomenon often linked to warming, such as natural disasters. Have they become more common and more deadly? Is there a debate about it? Why? And just how do scientists reconstruct surface temperatures from long ago? Are some of their methods controversial?

Not everyone agrees with our points of view," Packard said. "But we always hang on to our conviction about being science-based

- I didnt know science was a point of view.

As it turns out, however, none of this is true, as Sell explains in his angry letter to the Times. He and his coauthors do not mention blondes at all in their paper and they don’t even have hair color in their data. The supplementary analyses that Sell performed after the publication of the paper, as a personal favor to the Times reporter, show the exact opposite of what the Times article claims. After he presumably listened to Sell explain all of this on the phone, the Times reporter nonetheless made up the whole thing, and attributed it to Sell.

Human behavioral ecologist Rebecca Bird had a different reaction to the new study.

"I think it's ridiculous and naive to assume that there's a gene for vegetable procurement" or for navigation through a mall, said Bird, of Stanford University in California. Context is far more important, she said, "because humans are ecologically general creatures."

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.
Little of this has come as a surprise to those who have studied the workings of the IPCC over the years. As I show in my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, there is no greater misconception about the IPCC than that it was intended to be an impartial body, weighing scientific evidence for and against global warming.

This is why, in the last analysis, the hacked (or allegedly hacked) e-mails to and from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia have been getting so much attention. As scientist John Christy explains in an interview with IEEE Spectrum, East Anglia has played a key role in formulating the recent history of the world's temperature, and if that history has been misrepresented, then a case can be made that recent warming is mainly the result of natural cycles, not emissions from human activity.

The hockey stick graph was reproduced in the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and no double had a big impact on opinion primarily because it is so easy to look at and understand.

imo - no credible scientist should be pleased with creating a plot that combined temperatures estimated from tree ring data & actual global mean temperatures together as a single data line without distinguishing them. Nice looking plots indeed.

I am continuously impressed with the quality of articles members of the Sigma Xi produce regarding academia and research. "Computational illiteracy" clearly plagues the sciences, as climategate has shown us. They haven't been listening for decades !

Factual data are crucial in real science. Einstein himself urged that his own theory of relativity not be accepted until it could be empirically verified. This verification came when scientists around the world observed an eclipse of the sun and discovered that light behaved as Einstein's theory said it would behave, however implausible that might have seemed beforehand.

Today, politicized "science" has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may.

People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs underway and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth