ioannidis
denialism | February 6, 2009
What do this cartoon and the latest edition of PLoS One have in common? Well, reading Bora's blog this week I saw an article entitled, Risks for Central Nervous System Diseases among Mobile Phone Subscribers: A Danish Retrospective Cohort Study and my ears perked up. We have been mocking the idea that cell phones cause everything from brain cancer to colony collapse disorder and it's always fun to see what cell phones are being blamed for based on weak associations and correlations.
In this article the authors identified more than four hundred thousand cell phone subscribers and linked…
ddobbs | January 12, 20063My piece in yesterday’s New York Times on errors in scientific journals lacked room to consider a key factor generating the sort of fraud that has haunted science lately: The way publishing concentrates and broadcasts not just the sort of error that John Ioannidis writes about, but power and money (its imprimatur), which can corrupt and lead to the sort of fraud Hwang indulged in.
While top researchers a couple generations ago lived modestly, today they command fat salaries and wield immense power. These perks provide extra motivation not just for cheating but for the overreaching — the half…