Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

Half the facts you know are wrong.

December 25, 2012 9:43 am Robert Zimmerman

The uncertainty of science: Half the facts you know are wrong.

Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each one is how the scientific process is supposed to work; experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. So how many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disquieting study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over 10 years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”

Or in other words, anyone who claims the “science is settled” on any major scientific issue that other scientists are hotly debating is lying to you.

One comment

Complaints about compliance with Freedom of Information requests jumped 28 percent during the Obama adminstration’s first term.

December 25, 2012 9:31 am Robert Zimmerman

Transparency: Complaints about compliance with Freedom of Information requests jumped 28 percent during the Obama adminstration’s first term.

This is not to say that the Bush administration was transparent. They were not, as they, like all governments, didn’t want the public to poke into their operations. The issue here is the absurd claim by Obama that his administration would be different. Poppycock. If anything, the Obama administration has been more abusive, draping itself in a veil of purity that they do not deserve in order to hide their illegal behavior.

Sadly, their partisan Democratic supporters — including the press — have blindly accepted these claims of purity and allowed the illegal behavior to be ignored.

2 comments

The investigation into the failure of the Proton rocket’s Briz-M upper stage on December 8 has pinpointed the failure to a turbopump.

December 25, 2012 9:13 am Robert Zimmerman

The investigation into the failure of the Proton rocket’s Briz-M upper stage on December 8 has pinpointed the failure to a turbopump.

While it is a good thing that they have found the cause of the failure, this is not the same component that failed previously. Moreover, after the previous failure the Russians had said they would dismantle and inspect all Briz-M stages under production. It is obvious that they did not find this turbopump problem then.

All told, these issues do not recommend the Briz-M upper stage or the Proton rocket that depends on it. What else might be wrong with this upper stage that they might be missing? Until they can reassure potential customers that this question has been answered, the Russians are going to have a serious problem competing in the increasingly competitive launch market.

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.