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Showing posts with the label scholarly activity

New Truth - as Only I See It

There are two infamous publications in the world of scholarly activities, "The Journal of Irreproducible Results" and "How to Lie with Statistics."   One is a spoof on science truth published regularly (http://www.jir.com/); the second is an actual book.   The journal is interesting and funny.   But the book is well known to all practitioners, and the best of them know how to use statistics as needed to make a point, a claim, or a theory.    In a recent NY Times article by George Johnson (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/new-truths-that-only-one-can-see.html) the veracity of many publications are taken to the veracity task.   It is claimed that up to 80% of all publications are in error or just plain false. To quote from the article "It has been jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassur