It is only to be expected of course but the Boeing 787 Dreamliner will also surely have its share of teething difficulties. They seem relatively minor so far but the aircraft is after all 3 years late. I have not yet flown on the Dreamliner or the Airbus A380 but will not have any qualms about travelling on either when the opportunity arises. But the 4 engines on the A380 Airbus might be less stressful than just the 2 on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner for the first time on a new aircraft!
Chicago Tribune: A brand-new United Airlines “Dreamliner” airplane bound for Newark was diverted Tuesday morning, making an emergency landing in New Orleans because of an undisclosed mechanical problem. On Tuesday, the 7:30 a.m. United flight 1146 from Houston to Newark was diverted to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and landed safely there at 9:25 a.m., the airline said. The plane, the third delivered to United recently, carried 174 customers and 10 crew members. Neither United nor Boeing would describe the problem except to say it was a “mechanical issue.”
Seattle Times:The Federal Aviation Administration is ordering airlines to inspect 787 Dreamliners for improperly installed fuel-line connectors that could result in leaks or even fires. The safety directive, to be published Wednesday, gives airlines a week to check fuel-line system fastening wires and 21 days to check connectors inside the pylons that hold the engines. Fuel leaks were reported by airlines on two in-service 787s, and subsequent inspections by Boeing of jets in service or still in production revealed some fuel line connectors were installed incorrectly.
It is not the first time that “activists” have turned to dubious and manipulated science to further their cause. And it will not be the last. The peer-review process which is supposed to catch this kind of politically motivated pseudoscience is often not capable of doing so – and certainly not when the purported science is presented in a stage manged PR exercise. Anything published by an advocacy group may – sometimes – contain some science but – and it should be axiomatic – no advocacy report is ever science.
In this case a “scientist” – Gilles-Eric Seralini – who is also a well-known activist campaigning against GM crops managed to get the reputed Elsevier Food and Chemical Toxicology journal to publish some highly dubious results that genetically modified corn caused tumors in rats. Seralini is also known for making up honors or paying for them to be awarded to himself! Perhaps this should be called the “Greenpeace syndrome”. Greenpeace is not averse either to making up science to further their political goals. (In fact Greenpeace just today published another apparently independent study in favour of wind power but which they had themselves commissioned!)
(Reuters) – The publisher of a much-criticized study suggesting genetically modified corn caused tumors in rats has come under heavy pressure from scientists to retract the paper and explain why it was ever printed.
There are many industries which play the “science as marketing game” but perhaps the most blatant are the pharmaceutical and medical industries. Sometimes researchers are just unwitting pawns in the marketing game but in a sense they are also at fault in being susceptible to becoming pawns. This cautionary tale about the diabetes drug Avandia reported in the Washington Post only enforces my view that since society invests the scientist with an aura of objective truth-seeking, then society must also demand a measure of responsibility and accountability from the scientist. And that can only happen if scientists have a measure of liability for the “product” they produce.
COP18 in Doha enters its second week and politicians are now arriving in droves. A small fortune has already been spent during the first week. But this is a gathering of an alarmist movement built on unprovable fears. Inevitably the greedy “groupies” gather (some 17,000 of them). A convention of the cowardly in the “theatre of the absurd”.
As The Economist puts it
NEVER let it be said that climate-change negotiators lack a sense of the absurd. Thousands of politicians, tree-huggers and journalists descended on Doha this week, adding their mite of hot air to the country that already has the world’s highest level of carbon emissions per head. The feeling of unreality is apt. ……. The jamboree in Doha is the 18th UN climate-change summit, but the third since a landmark one at Copenhagen in 2009.
We shall see – and are seeing — new alarmist articles and press releases every day till the end of this week. But the fundamental problem is not so much the politics of alarmism connected with this one non-issue of climate change, but the fact that the once laudable environmental movement now resorts to the politics of fear. Courage is singularly lacking.
Courage is the subordination of fear to purpose. Today however with the politics of alarmism, fears dominate purpose. Inevitably these are fears which can never be disproved because they are forecasts of what lies a long way in the future. And the politics of fear generates its own greedy “groupies”
Once upon a time, the environmentalists were a courageous lot and were surely instrumental in the cleaning up of many areas from the effects of real pollution … But the simple virtues of keeping things clean and preventing disease and improving the standard of living for humans has given way to the more pompous and pretentious goals of preventing global warming (an unbridled arrogance), of maintaining bio-diversity (and why is this important?) and of preserving “scarce resources due to the “limits to growth”…
… Inevitably the politics of alarmism are accompanied by the opportunists whose greed leads to all the scams surrounding environmental subsidies for renewable power or for carbon trading.
Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. The word “anamorphosis” is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning back or again, and the word morphe, meaning shape or form.
The trick is pretty simple: the photographs are skewed but then filmed at an angle where everything looks normal, but when the illusion is revealed it’s still pretty mind-bending. Brusspup also provided downloadable high resolution files of the Rubik’s cube,shoe, andtapeso you can print them out on 8×11″ paper, trim, and try for yourself.
Sometimes I think that for psychiatry and psychiatrists, all behaviour is abnormal. Of course there is a vested financial interest for the discipline – which is a long way from being a science – to include as many behavioural conditions as possible within the definition of what is an ailment. In many countries it becomes of great benefit for the “patient” to be formally acknowledged to be suffering from an “ailment”. It can trigger insurance payments and be the qualification for financial and clinical support. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders produced by the American Psychiatric Association is the most influential standard for diagnosis in the US and is extensively used world-wide. Currently the 4th edition is in use (DSM IV) and the 5th edition, DSM V, is scheduled for release in May 2013. The debates and arguments about what is to be included or removed from DSM V is reminiscent of political lobbying!
I have the perception that far more behavioural conditions are included as “ailments” than should be. In that sense psychiatry causes more illness than it cures! The APA invites ridicule when it indulges in (Slate),
While the Indian origin of the European Roma populations is linguistically and genetically well-established, accurate identification of their South Asian source has remained a matter of debate. A new open access paper PLoS ONE 7(11): e48477. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0048477now pinpoints the ancestry of today’s Roma to the ancestors of the Adivasi (“original people) tribes of North West India.
I have no doubt that the Care Pathways have the best of intentions to make an inevitable death as painless and comfortable as possible. But at best this is euthanasia and at worst it is something else. The latest article in the Daily Mail’s “campaign” is more than a little disturbing. If a Care Pathway – by definition – is intended to lead to a dignified and pain-free death then causing additional suffering by being put on the Pathway cannot be right. I am not sure where the ethical line goes but I cannot help feeling that a final painless lethal injection may be preferable to 10 days of starvation and thirst and suffering as feeding and fluids are denied and a baby shrinks to death.
Maybe the detection of fraud has improved lately but it is still highly unlikely that the majority of cases are being discovered. I have the clear perception that the increasing number of cases of manipulating or faking data that are being discovered is just the tip of the iceberg. These cases – as with the case described in my previous post about Diedrik Stapel – also demonstrate the systemic disinclination of peers to be critical or to find fault with their colleagues. Traditional peer review has always had its failings but is now also proving to be incapable of handling the huge increase in the number of papers being published. And the apparently increasing incidence of fraud among scientists will not change until scientists can be held liable for their misconduct. Academic freedom is all very well but it needs to be tempered with some responsibility and some corresponding accountability.
In the long run – over a few centuries – it probably does not matter. Scientific cheating does not alter natural laws or relationships but in the short term of our lifetimes the damage is considerable. Not only does it waste resources but the the misdirection of other scientific efforts leads to much work being done on a foundation of quicksand. On the shoulders of midgets!
In this case where Eric Smart has been found to have been falsifying data for a decade, the Office of Research Integrity has published its findingsand 10 papers are to be retracted and he will not seek grants for 7 years. 13 researchers at his lab “have moved on to other projects and endeavors.” The papers to be withdrawn have been cited over 100 times.
The massive Diedrik Stapel fraudbroke a year agoand the final investigation report “Failing science: The fraudulent research practices of social psychologist Diederik Stapel” has now been published. The final fraud count is quite staggering. 55 papers, 10 theses and possibly a further 11 publications were fraudulent. That’s 10 PhD students who will have doctorates rescinded or must start from scratch! The report is in Dutch (pdf): Final Report Stapel Investigation
Human behaviour in all its aspects and including social psychology are certainly disciplines worthy of study and I would not go so far as to say they can never become sciences. But social psychology is certainly no science yet. Stapel’s behaviour – which is by no means unique for publicity hunting social psychologists – was nothing more than pseudoscience and will not advance the progress of this discipline into becoming a science.
A report into how a Dutch university professor was able to fake research data for years blames the absence of a critical scientific culture at academic institutions.
Stapel, who was a professor of social and behavioural sciences at Tilburg, was suspended in September 2011 after doubts emerged about research that concluded eating meat makes people anti-social and selfish.
The report, compiled by special commissions from four universities where Stapel worked, concludes at least 55 out of 130 academic papers written by Stapel and 10 graduate student theses he was supervising contain fraudulent data. There are doubts about the authenticity of a further 11 papers.
The 108-page report says colleagues who worked with Stapel had not been sufficiently critical. This was not deliberate fraud but ‘academic carelessness’, the report said. ‘The critical function of science has failed at all levels,’ the report said.
In a statement, Stapel said he had failed as a scientist. ‘I am deeply, deeply sorry for the pain I have caused others,’ he said. ‘I feel sorry, shame and I blame myself. The truth would have been better served without me.’
…. Finance ministry officials are also investigating Stapel because much of his work was funded by public research money.
The k2p blog 