Scientists are human, especially medical/pharmacological scientists

Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh finds that 2% to 14% of scientists have "fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once":

The frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct is a matter of controversy. Many surveys have asked scientists directly whether they have committed or know of a colleague who committed research misconduct, but their results appeared difficult to compare and synthesize. This is the first meta-analysis of these surveys. ....

A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices.

The problem varied by discipline with reports of misconduct appearing most frequently among "medical/pharmacological researchers."

I suspect that, when all the results are in, it will also be found that global warming has an exception amount of scientific fraud.

Biased research

"Racism is real," claims Yvette Cozier, an epidemiologist at the Slone Epidemiology Center at BU who just published a stiudy of more than 43,000 women enrolled in the long-running Black Women's Health Study. Racism might be real but her study does not show it.

Gay marriage advocates and changing polls

Gallup reports that support for gay marriage has dropped to 40% from a high of 47% two years ago. (57% are currently opposed.) Why the drop? I suppose that it mostly has to due with the behavior of those supporting gay marriage, such as the demonizing of Mormons following the passage of California's proposition 8 or the outbursts (as illustrated by Steve Benson) of Perez Hilton after Miss California adopted the majority position on gay marriage and the same position that Pres. Obama holds:

PREVIOUSLY:
Politicizing the Miss USA contest
The bullying of Carrie Prejean

Obama's philosophy, illustrated

Chip Bok explains President Obama's approach to politics in two frames:

More Chip Bok cartoons here.

Eco-hypocrite of the day

Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke today at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China

"I do see this opportunity for climate change to be ... a game-changer," she said at Tsinghua. .... "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory ... of how we are taking responsibility."

This is the same Nancy Pelosi who insists on flying military jets and then complains that the jets are not large enough for her.

RELATED: Michelle Malkin sees this as just one example of our weird times.

Obama nominates a racist

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's Supreme Court nominee, explains how Latina judges are "better" than white males:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life. [Emph. added]

She is modest enough to acknowledge that she is unsure whether her superiority as a Latina is due to "experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences."

RELATED on the subject of racism:
"That's just how white folks will do you." ---Barack Obama
Stanford finds Democrats are racist
Leaders acknowledge Democrat base is racist
Democrat justifies race hatred
A Web Browser for Racial Separatists
He's not black and he can't represent me, that's just the bottom line
NAACP defends racism in education

RELATED on the subject of Judge Sotomayer:
Michelle Malkin has a round-up Pam at RightVoices notes that NBC is asking "Would Republicans dare vote against first Hispanic?" Did NBC ever ask about Democrats opposing the first Hispanic Attorney General? Probably not. Feddie at Southern Appeal thinks this nomination is not worth a fight. Bookworm Room has an extensive round-up.

UPDATE: Newt Gingrich explains the issue as follows: "Imagine a judicial nominee said, 'My experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.' New racism is no better than old racism."

Since when did the left become pro-nuke?

Last Wednesday, John Bolton wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal discussing US policy, North Korea, nuclear containment, presciently entitled Get Ready for Another North Korean Nuke Test.  This prompted Allison Kilkenny of the Huffington Post to respond:

A dictator only has a few options to show he's still hot shit, and one of those is to blast a missile into the ocean. But it's not a threat to the United States. It's actually just pathetic. Call it the official countdown of Kim. He's also sick, weak, and may have had a stroke.

And yet all of these facts couldn't soothe the nerves of our mustachioed maverick, John Bolton. Get Ready for Another North Korean Nuke Test he hollers at the top of the page.

Notice the left-liberal reasoning: a nuclear bomb in the hands on North Korea is nothing to worry about because their current leader is "sick, weak, and may have had a stroke"  and, besides, their missiles currently only reach Japan!  How is the health of North Korean's current leader relevant?  It wont' stop his nukes from exploding.  There is no reason to think his successor would renounce nukes.  So, what is the point?   Also note how lightly the Huffington Post takes a possible nuking Japan, considering it to be "pathetic."  If North Korea can threaten Japan with nukes, doesn't that change things?  Granted that North Korea has not yet demonstrated an ICBM capable of reaching the US.  So, today, "it's not a theat": but, is a shortsighted view like that a sensible way to run foreign policy?  Leave it to the left to make irresponsibility into a virtue.

Hat tip: Jules Crittenden and Legal Insurrection.

Friendly part of brain identified

According to a University of Cambridge press release, scientists have identified two parts of the brain that are associated with warm and social people:

The volunteers underwent a brain scan using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). They also completed a questionnaire that asked them to rate themselves on items such as 'I make a warm personal connection with most people', or 'I like to please other people as much as I can'. The answers to the questionnaire provide an overall measure of emotional warmth and sociability called social reward dependence.

The researchers then analysed the relationship between social reward dependence and the concentration of grey matter (brain-cell containing tissue) in different brain regions. They found that the greater the concentration of tissue in the orbitofrontal cortex (the outer strip of the brain just above the eyes), and in the ventral striatum (a deep structure in the centre of the brain), the higher they tended to score on the social reward dependence measure. The research is published in the European Journal of Neuroscience. ....

Interestingly, the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum have previously been shown to be important for the brain's processing of much simpler rewards like sweet tastes or sexual stimuli.

Wikipedia (source warning) has an image that shows the orbitofrontal cortex (green):


An image from NIH shows the ventral striatum below (purple):

The Obama disaster

Under the Bush-Obama "stimulus" plan, with deficits without precedents, this plot, from the Wall Street Journal, shows how the federal debt will grow:
In an interview with C-SPAN host Steve Scully, Pres. Obama said "[W]e are out of money now." The solution to this, as he is it, is to spend more (as per the above graph) and nationalize health care.

RELATED:
A graph of Obama's planned deficits.
EU finds Obama debt plan too extreme.
The inmates are running the asylum.

After years of howling, Dems still have no plan

The AP reports that Dems still have no plans for how to close Gitmo:

With debate looming on Obama's spending request to cover military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official says Democrats will deny the Pentagon and Justice Department $80 million to relocate Guantanamo's 241 detainees. ....

The administration has yet to develop a plan for what to do with the detainees, and Obama's promise to close the facility is facing strong GOP opposition.[emph. added]

Karl Marx wrotes endlessly on the evils of "capitalism" but wrote no more than a few cryptic paragraphs on how Marxism was supposed to work.  Similarly, Democrats have spent years writing (and shouting) about Gitmo but it is now obvious that they had put no thought into what would replace it.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

CSI Fail

I had suspected that "bite-mark" matches were pseudo-science: Radley Balko has confirmation, complete with video of a respected bite-mark expert reaching a wrong result.

Wolfram Alpha

According to the hype, Wolfram Alpha was supposed to changed the world:

New software making its debut this month is being heralded as a revolutionary development that could put Google to shame and represent a first step toward a global source of information that understands and responds to ordinary language. The system, called Wolfram Alpha, not only will be able to answer questions such as "How high is Mount Everest?" but it will be able to instantly calculate....

I tried a simple query:

Google, by contrast returned with many useful hits:

Hype isn't reality.

Wolfram Alpha is reportedly powered by "the world's 66th-fastest supercomputer." Maybe, 66th place isn't good enough.

Vaguely RELATED:
NASA doctor says Speaker Pelosi suffers from hysterical amnesia

Yet another New York Times scandal, or two

Maureen Dowd was caught plagiarizing Josh Marshall.  This is also another example of the merging of left-wing blogs and mainstream media.

In a separate New York Times scandal, reporter Stephanie Strom knew about allegedly illegal collaboration between the Obama campaign and ACORN but when her witness agreed to go on the record, Strom's editor, Suzanne Daley, killed the story because it was a "game-changer" that would make Obama look bad.

Obamanomics visualized

John Cole explains President's Obama approach to budget planning:


RELATED: In the rush to spend, the Feds are sending "stimulus" checks to dead people, even some who have been dead for decades.

Obama and abuse of power

George Will reviews Obama's Chrysler/UAW and California/SEIU policies and concludes:

This is not gross, unambiguous lawlessness of the Nixonian sort -- burglaries, abuse of the IRS and FBI, etc. -- but it is uncomfortably close to an abuse of power that perhaps gave Nixon ideas: When in 1962 the steel industry raised prices, President John F. Kennedy had a tantrum and his administration leaked rumors that the IRS would conduct audits of steel executives, and sent FBI agents on predawn visits to the homes of journalists who covered the steel industry, ostensibly to further a legitimate investigation.

Hat tip: Celestial Junk

RELATED: As regards bullying banks, Obama policy is a continuation of the Bush/Paulson policy.

Political Scoundrels, II

Victor Davis Hanson reports that, back in 2002, Eric Holder supported enhanced interrogation:

Here's what Eric Holder-set to examine whether or not to depose, indict, whatever Bush's legal advisors, told CNN in January 2002 about Guantanamo inmates:

"It seems to me you can think of these people as combatants and we are in the middle of a war. And it seems to me that you could probably say, looking at precedent, that you are going to detain these people until war is over, if that is ultimately what we wanted to do." Later in 2002 Holder elaborated, "One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located. Under the Geneva Convention, you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people...[They] are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war...

Now as US Attorney General, he is/was considering prosecuting/sanctioning those who did what he recommended.

Hat tip: Vocal Minority.

PREVIOUSLY on the topic of political scoundrels:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer flip flop on torture
NASA doctor says Speaker Pelosi suffers from hysterical amnesia

PREVIOUSLY on the general attitude of "that was then, this is now":
Broadcasters discover a duty to broadcast presidential speeches.
Al Gore blasted Bush for ignoring Saddam's connections to terrorism
Before advocating surrender, Senators Biden and Hagel advocated a 10-year Iraq campaign.

Political scoundrels

It's not just Speaker Pelosi who has flip-flopped on harsh interrogation (AKA "torture"). Ed Morrissey documents Sen. Chuck Schumer's support of harsh interrogation in 2004 followed by his current (2009) support for the DoJ prosecuting those who supported harsh interrogation.

I cannot predict what their position will be on the issue five years from now but I am sure that it will be whatever is politically convenient at that moment.

RELATED: what real torture looks like.

Obamanomics and the test of science

In science, theories are tested by experiment.  In January, Obama's economic team predicted, using their Keynesian theories, how much better the economy would be if the economic "stimulus" package was passed than if it wasn't. It is May and there is enough data to compare: so far, according to their plots, the economy is worse, not better.

In economics, like in climate, a single test is not dispositive but it is informative.

Posner's ignorance

Richard Posner writes:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. .... Conservative intellectuals had no party.

And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Kenyes, a conservatives' bête noire.

This displays shocking ignorance.  First, Friedman is part of the Austrian school of economics which regards business cycles as normal not "unanticipated."  Second, the mortgage and banking crisis were widely anticipated by conservatives and even Republicans, just not by Democrats.  Posner's claim that conservative economics lacks "intellectual groundings" is simply due to Posner failure to read.

Would a professional photographer have taken a photo that ugly?

Ann Althouse points out that the White House explanation of the Air Force-1 flight over NYC doesn't add up.  It would be helpful if, at a press briefing, an inquisitive reporter asked the obvious questions but, of course, that is not likely.

Related: A WH staffer takes the fall.