Elsewhere on the Interweb (9/24/07)

Encephalon 32 is up at Living the Scientific Life.

The Chernobyl reactor will be encased in a huge steel arch.

This business sounds suspiciously similar to the Simpsons movie.

Larry Summers is not allowed to talk at UC-Davis:

What's more, academic freedom depends on reactions like the response to Summers's 2005 comments. Knowledgeable scholars including the sociologist (and my colleague) Kim Shauman explained that there was actually a great deal more research into, and knowledge of, the ways women founder in scientific careers than Summers had originally suggested. Summers, Shauman said, was "uninformed." As the economist Brad DeLong noted, "Summers's views on gender, genetics, and math achievement are almost certainly wrong, are unsupported, and should not be pushed forward by somebody who is twenty years beyond the stage of his career where you throw out lots of unfiltered ideas in the belief that what matters is the quality of your best one." For the scholarly community to retain its rights, it must present evidence and argument to define what is and isn't good scholarship--that's how the ideas of, say, an Edward Ross become known as bad sociology.

Chemerinsky lost a deanship for expressing expert opinions that rubbed someone the wrong way. His case tells UC professors we should watch what we say in the newspapers, which is bad enough. Yet the proscription of Summers represents, in principle, a more serious limit to academic freedom on UC campuses: Lawrence Summers and his ideas are apparently unhearable here.

President Admadinejad of Iran is allowed to talk at Columbia (in spite of protests):

"Why do some people not want to hear another point of view?" he said through an interpreter to reporters in Washington via a video link. "I'm surprised that in a place where they claim they have freedom of information they are trying to prevent people from talking."

Ahmadinejad also denied that his country wished to dominate Iraq or other Middle Eastern states and criticized the U.S. presence there.

"We think that regional countries themselves can know how to run the affairs of the region best," he said. "They don't need a guardian from outside to tell them how to do it."

Columbia has faced sharp criticism since it announced last week that it had invited Ahmadinejad, who is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meetings.

Maybe that is why there are so many police in New York today.

Orac summarizes some misuse of scientific self-criticism:

Pity poor John Ioannidis.

The man does provocative work about the reliability of scientific studies as published in the peer-reviewed literature, and his reward for trying to point out shortcomings in how we as scientists and clinical researchers do studies and evaluate evidence is to be turned into an icon for cranks and advocates of pseudoscience--or even antiscience. I first became aware of Ioannidis two years ago around the time of publication of a paper by him that caused a stir, entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. In that study, Ioannidis concluded that approximately 1/3 of highly cited clinical studies are later found to be incorrect and that therapeutic effects initially found in clinical trials are often found in later studies to be smaller or even nonexistent. Ioannidis then followed up with an editorial entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. In response, I noted how alternative medicine mavens and others who are into pseudoscience jumped all over the study and how it even explained why antivaccinationists should not be surprised that effects attributed to thimerosal in vaccines in early iterations of studies disappeared on further analysis. Indeed, I even pointed out how some prominent credulous bloggers were citing Ioannidis as evidence that most scientists are "lousy."

Recognizing that statistically you are likely to say things that are later proven wrong != an inditement of the entire scientific process. MarkH has more.

Read the whole thing.