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Heavy Blow to Scientific Credibility

July 29, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

The entire theory (and research thereon) that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by “amyloid beta” protein plaques, which has been around since a widely publicized and seminal 2006 paper, now teeters on the brink of implosion, or at least deep and major reworking. A six-month Science magazine-supported investigation reveals “doctored” (pun not intended, but fits) medical imaging of the sufferers’ brains. Those images appeared inside that first paper, other papers by the same authors, and on down through more papers by others that used the original work and data as a foundation.

Many tens of millions of dollars of research, across 16 years of elapsed time, is at risk, thanks to irreproducibility and perhaps outright tampering. That risk includes waste of a lot of taxpayer funding. If these images contain bogus alterations (in effect, unethically altering data to fit hypotheses), as independent analysis hired by Science magazine have affirmed, this could become the greatest scientific scandal of our time, and that’s saying something.

Science (the profession), and medical science in particular, are having a tough time reputationally right now — most of it not deserved, but some of it well-earned, unfortunately. Science (the profession) doesn’t need any more body blows to credibility. The great majority of scientists are honest and ethical. I know many in meteorology and other geosciences, and even a few in medicine. Scientists absolutely should be held to utmost high ethical standards. Still, as with any profession, human nature can infest science with bad actors too — some of whom are smart enough to get away with it, at least for awhile.

Yes, science is self-correcting, but the time for that with this topic was *before* publication, during peer review — or at the very latest, independent reproduction shortly after with retractions…but not 16 years and countless research time and money later. Better late than never in exposing potential misconduct, of course — but this has a uniquely foul stench due to the broad impact. It’s not some obscure work with an audience of ten, investigating the electrical conductivity of a piece of tree bark in Tasmania. Instead this is a horrid disease that impacts millions of people, now and future, with enormous social and economic cost, and most of us know someone(s) affected.

As a (non-medical) scientist and photographer, who is also a journal editor, I care about experimental and data reproducibility, photographic & science ethics, as well as waste of taxpayers’ research funding. I’ve also lost friends and colleagues to Alzheimer’s disease. That all makes this revelation rather infuriating.

Please read the full, long-form article (linked here again) for the full story. Here is an excerpt:

If Schrag’s doubts are correct, Lesné’s findings were an elaborate mirage.

Schrag, who had not publicly revealed his role as a whistleblower until this article, avoids the word “fraud” in his critiques of Lesné’s work and the Cassava-related studies and does not claim to have proved misconduct. That would require access to original, complete, unpublished images and in some cases raw numerical data. “I focus on what we can see in the published images, and describe them as red flags, not final conclusions,” he says. “The data should speak for itself.”

A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schrag’s suspicions and raised questions about Lesné’s research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.

The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: Alzheimer's, bad science, ethics, medicine, peer review, photography ethics, reproducibility, research, science, science media, scientific ethics, scientific fraud, scientific misconduct

The Fallacy of “Compromise” with Gaslighting Forces of Tyranny

July 17, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

Compromise is great for business deals, arbitration, professional workplace disagreements, property-line disputes, and the like. At lawmaking governance levels, it’s often needed to get something done (say, to get enough legislators of the opposition party aboard to pass a budget).

However, compromise is, like most concepts involving social interaction, prone to abuse.

Stay alert to ways you can be compromised adversely, manipulated and taken advantage of, and resist those — whether at personal levels by abusive “friends” and “lovers”, or on larger scales, by government and media. Yes, you can be on the wrong side of an abusive relationship with a governing authority. History is chock full of examples.

A large-scale, abusive use of the concept of compromise is when high authorities wish to restrict the liberty of the people. That’s called tyranny. Genocides under Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are famous large-scale examples just in the last 100 years. Without quite as much overt killing (yet still a lot, per the Uighurs), is the ongoing, worsening, Orwellian techno-control dictatorship in mainland China.

Less extreme, but just as insidious, are slow-drip, incremental tactics here and anywhere else in the so-called Free World, acclimatizing people to each seemingly minuscule sacrifice of freedom, until one day, you are in a de facto prison. How does that occur? Convince you to give up your own liberty, and it’s rather easy.

Gaslighting occurs not just in personal relationships, but by Big Bureaucracy. “Confused? We’re the experts at telling you what’s real, all else is disinformation.” “Here, this pain I’m doling out is for your own good.” This process can be sudden, or creep along in tiny steps spanning years, or even generations. Generations…don’t we owe it to our children, and theirs, to ensure their liberties are greater than ours, not less?

At societal scales, freedom almost never returns after being sacrificed for what command-and-control figures plea is the “common good”. Who are they to define it? Who are they to make my decisions for me regarding anything I do that doesn’t directly and provably (in a legal, beyond-reasonable doubt sense) harm another individual?

Better it is to leave “common good” decisions to local scales, where groups of neighbors can better contextualize solutions to local needs. Neighborhoods and towns, perhaps even cities if not too large and diverse, work best. Above that, the bigger the scale of government, the greater the fallacy of “common good” when it comes to anything affecting freedom. Why? Simple: one size doesn’t fit all. In a physically and culturally vast nation like ours, the people and their situations are too diverse (by the true meaning of diversity) for that.

To wit, water restrictions in Las Vegas are rather inappropriate for Upper Michigan, on whose shores wash the three biggest Great Lakes. Fuel taxes hurt the Kansas wheat farmer or the poverty-level working single mom in Bakersfield more than the Boston loft dweller with no car. The same federal and state red tape involving business books and taxes burdens the margin-straddling machine shop in Minnetonka proportionately harder than the Minnesota Vikings, whose owner hires legions of accountants at the snap of a finger. Even within one city, zoning must vary, because development, drainage and land-use needs are nonuniform. More examples abound, by the millions, in countless situations.

Big bureaucracy commonly imposes, after gaslighting us into accepting they’re for our own benefit, or the benefit of others, one-size “solutions” justified off “the common good”. Again one size does not fit all.

Beware simple tactics of propaganda, such as the use of the words “compassion” or “empathy” in the political context; those are quite often little tools of psychological manipulation to soften resistance against top-down theft of freedoms. Bureaucracy cannot have “compassion” nor “empathy”. Only individuals and God can.

Freedom is God-given, per the concept of free will. As the Founders rightly recognized and wrote, our rights come not from the government, but are bestowed by the Creator on the governed. Liberty is a divinely inspired ideal! We should treat it as no less important than that.

Give the agents of tyranny an inch, and they’ll take a mile. Therefore, those who value life and liberty should not yield even an inch to those who wish to take it. “Compromise” with tyranny only incrementalizes its takeover.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: common good, compassion, compromise, empathy, freedom, gaslighting, government, individual liberty, liberty, tyranny

American Education: Emulate the Asian Model of Rigor and Effort

July 2, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

Sacrificing scholastic excellence and high achievement in the name of “equity” is destructive to the health of our society as a whole.  Though this story presents more of an India-rooted angle, we’ve known for decades that Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other east Asian nations’ pupils blow ours away mathematically at the same age levels. This has been such a sustained phenomenon that to ignore it is profoundly foolhardy.

It’s not racial, it’s cultural.  Culture is changeable.  The malignant American culture of familial brokenness, parental uninvolvement/apathy, valuing materialism and entertainment over knowledge and diligence, artifice and appearances over results and work, “equity” that undermines excellence, and other contributors to academic underperformance, needs to change for the better here.  We must also strip sociopolitical agendas out of education and return to curricular fundamentals:  reading, writing, mathematics, and factual history.  Apply to it the rigor of late-1800s to early-1900s grade-level texts, but the updated factual knowledge of today, under stern and unyielding expectations of excellence, encouraging the hardcore work ethic of the Asian study model.

I’ve seen first-hand, even back to my childhood as a “gifted student” with such classmates, the readily apparent, tremendous value and time investment that these cultures place on education. Such families (most certainly including first-generation immigrants) are doing something right, and it should be replicated, not ignored nor discouraged.

And yes, poor kids can and do achieve high academically despite the economic handicaps.  I have some first-hand experience there as non-immigrant yet economically poor “white trash”, as did many of those first- to second-generation immigrant Hmong, Han Chinese (escaping Maoist communism), non-Hmong Vietnamese, and Korean and Japanese students I knew who mostly had been treated like trash in their native lands, except for the Koreans and Japanese.  Yet they succeeded in school despite their socioeconomic and linguistic limitations, and because of ferociously diligent work ethics imparted in a close familial setting.  For them there was family honor in high scholastic achievement, not just personal reputation, with family valued over self.

This offers non-scholastic lessons from which we can learn.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: academics, Asian achievement, childhood, curricula, discipline, education, educational system, honor, parenthood, rigor, work ethic

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