Tasselli mancanti – O's digest

La rivista PLoS One pubblica The missing pieces, una prima raccolta di risultati negativi, nulli o inconcludenti, tentativi falliti di replicare soprattutto esperimenti in psicologia (parapsicologia compresa) e in bio-medicina. In quelli che ho letto, i problemi sono quasi sempre statistici.

Paradossalmente, Marcel van Assen et al. rifanno i conti di “Why Selective Publication of Statistically Significant Results Can Be Effective” di Jost de Winter e Riender Happee, uscito nel 2013 proprio su PLoS One:

Using their scenario with a small to medium population effect size, we show that publishing everything is more effective for the scientific collective than selective publishing of significant results. Additionally, we examined a scenario with a null effect, which provides a more dramatic illustration of the superiority of publishing everything over selective publishing.

Conclusione, non sprecare:

Although W&H proposed an interesting approach, we argue on the basis of the current results and our philosophical view that rigorous scientific data should never be wasted, and that the preferred approach to publishing is to have all information out there.

C’è anche il Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, ma non riceve molti contributi.

Su Nature, Chris Woolston scrive:

A controversial statistical test has finally met its end, at least in one journal. Earlier this month, the editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology (BASP) announced that the journal would no longer publish papers containing P values because the statistics were too often used to support lower-quality research…

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Da Nature

A parte il supplemento “Innovations in the microbiome” con rassegne e papers in open access; la misura dell’energia dell’effetto serra causato da +22 ppm di CO2; il quasar segnalato ieri da Giancarlo De Marchis; i vantaggi della biodiversità e di conoscerla che citavo oggi in radio:
-un editoriale di Alison Abbott che torna sul “caso Stamina”, a proposito dei risultati dell’indagine del Senato pubblicata il 18 febbraio

Most strikingly, the Senate investigation found no systematic failure in the state’s technical agencies mandated to protect the public. The message from scientific experts in these agencies was loud and clear: that the Stamina claims had no merit and the technique carried considerable risks. But this expertise was ignored by other pillars of the state: the legislature and judiciary.  
The Stamina case has been a disgrace to Italy, but (…)N  a day after publication of the Senate report, the European Commission formally authorized the Western world’s first-ever approval for a stem-cell therapy: a treatment for a rare type of blindness that has been  developed entirely by Italian scientists, working exclusively in Italy.
It is not just in the political world that researchers can help others to see more clearly.

Il medicinale è l’Holoclar, a base di staminali derivate da cellule epiteliali, prodotto da una spin-off dell’univ. di Modena-Reggio Emilia.

– Altro editoriale sul “caso Willie Soon”
One thing does not add up. The Center for Astrophysics, after all, is launching an investigation into one of its own staff members on the basis of the evidence of its own documents, but only after it was forced to hand them to an environmental group under a Freedom of Information Act request. Whether or not Soon fully disclosed the source of his funding to all of the journals remains unclear, but the basic facts were always there.
Alcock says that his job is to protect academic freedom at all costs. Fair enough. But freedom comes with responsibilities.

– Nuovo appello di Pardis Sabeti e due colleghi del Broad:

We urge researchers working on outbreaks to embrace a culture of openness. For our part, we have released all our sequence data as soon as it has been generated, including that from several hundred more Ebola samples we recently received from Kenema. We have listed the research questions that we are pursuing at virological.org and through GenBank, and we plan to present our results at virological.org as we generate them, for others to weigh in on. We invite people either to join our publication, or to prepare their own while openly laying out their intentions online. We have also made clinical data for 100 patients publicly available and have incorporated these into a user-friendly data-visualization tool, Mirador, to allow others to explore the data and uncover new insights.
Kenema means ‘translucent, clear like a river stream’ or ‘open to the public gaze’. To honour the memory of our colleagues who died at the forefront of the Ebola outbreak, and to ensure that no future epidemic is as devastating, let’s work openly in outbreaks.

Il paper sui 104 pazienti.

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FuF

Dal delizioso lagomorfo, c’è il video della conferenza di Steve Chu su clima, energia e disinformazione. Guess what? Il suo interesse per la fusione fredda era una bufala dei FuFisti…

A proposito: “no copper” nel tubo rotto di Parkhomov e no news del test di oggi.
Agg.  28/02.  Per via di un parente di Parkhomov con l’influenza, il test è iniziato solo nel pomeriggio:

The big question is probably “excess heat or not?” well, Bob (l’inviato del MFMP a Mosca,  ndr) says he had to bow out of the experiment at 00:12 this morning to travel back from the eastern Moscow suburbs to his accommodation, leaving Alexander to work through the night running the rest of the experiment. He says that he made several verifications of measurements and processes and has captured the written notes from the experiment, so that when Dr. Parkhomov presents results, they should be consistent with what was observed real-time.