Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

  • Home
  • About
  • Archives

Powered by Genesis

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

Trump’s Serious Diagnosis as a Test of Your Humanity

October 2, 2020 by tornado Leave a Comment

A litmus test of someone’s humanity is whether they celebrate another’s suffering. Even in my limited sampling of less than half an hour, it’s clear a lot of people on social media are failing that test today.

In case you’ve been under a rock or detached from news for 24 hours, several people who were at the Rose Garden event for Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination have come down with the Wuhan-originated (factual statement!) coronavirus. This includes President Trump and Melania, the First Lady. Also infected: presidential adviser Hope Hicks (the spreader?), Kellyanne Conway, RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, Sens. Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, Rev. Ron Jenkins (President of Notre Dame University, where Barrett matriculated), and a few others. So far, VP Mike Pence has tested negative, with no word on Barrett. Since this disease skews its harm toward the old, chances are somebody from this group will have serious problems. I hope not, but hope isn’t scientifically falsifiable virology.

Disagreements with someone’s policies (and I certainly have some with this president’s, but that’s irrelevant) don’t justify being glad somebody is sick with potentially deadly virus. This is a serious disease for anyone, much less a 77-year-old out-of-shape male. That’s among the highest-risk profiles. This truly could kill or permanently maim him, and it’s no laughing matter.

I would say the same if Biden caught this disease and “conservatives” celebrated. Given recent contacts, Biden just might; so in case he does, refer to this same post as well. It applies equally.

There is no valid rationalization for wishing personal misery on someone because you don’t like their governance policies or think they’re a rotten person. There’s also no such thing as Karma. The virus doesn’t care about political affiliation nor your opinion thereof.

I’m not just talking about the obvious hate ghouls you can easily find on Twitter overtly wishing suffering and death on someone else. [There are *thousands*…I am not kidding. It’s not hard to find them right now if you try just a little.] At least the overt haters reveal who they are openly and with brutal honesty. I can respect that (and report it), even as I strongly disapprove of their behavior.

Perhaps more pathetic are the implicit, passive-aggressive expressions from people who preach often about kindness and “empathy”. It’s especially disappointing to see a few self-professed Christians cheering this on, albeit tacitly in a lame attempt to put a smiley veneer over their real sentiments, but who have referred to the President as a horrible person.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Heard of that? We’ve all been guilty at some point, including me; regardless, that reminder is sorely needed now for a lot of people. In general terms, it is possible to disagree with somebody and disapprove their sinful *behavior*, without hating them as people or wishing grave misery on them. Try it.

Another character test is if you are willing to pray for Trump despite your disagreements with him. Can you? I won’t know, and don’t need to. However, God knows, and that’s who really matters in all this.

What I told my Facebook “friends” (and I don’t accept requests from people I don’t know and haven’t met) is: “If you’re the sort who will revel in another’s suffering, I should ‘unfriend’ you, but won’t. Why? Because you need to be watched…closely.” So if you know someone behaving this way, keep an eye on them, for real; something pathological and perhaps demonic could be at work.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: Donald Trump, ethics, hate, love, medicine, morals, politics

Why Bad Ideas Spread

May 2, 2020 by tornado Leave a Comment

Why would anybody take seriously an offhanded, poorly worded statement from Donald Trump (who makes offhanded, poorly worded statements by the hundreds per month…you should know this by now!) about ingesting bleach? I doubt the statement was malicious, or even serious, but it was badly phrased by a bumbling buffoon, and some people have been stupid enough to take it literally. Others have blown it out of proportion as validation for their own deep partisan biases.

Medicine doesn’t have many answers yet about the Wuhan coronavirus. Meteorology can’t tell you why the tornado hit this neighborhood and not the one across the road, nor which neighborhood could be flattened next week. Yet incredibly, people demand such answers, utterly ignorant of the limits of science, and of uncertainty.

When scientists cannot fill a knowledge gap, charlatans rush in to fill it for them, to provide counterfeit certainty. It’s how disgraced, false-teaching “Christian” televangelist Jim Bakker can allow a snake-oil hack to peddle some silver solution as a coronavirus cure. It’s how a weather company can offer specific 40-day temperature forecasts, when there is no demonstrated skill in that whatsoever. I’ve heard this said first-hand to another meteorologist, seriously: “You can’t tell me if it will rain at my sister’s wedding next month? Lame! What kind of idiot weather man are you anyway?”

A fundamental problem exists in common between this bleach-ingestion situation and making insanely unreasonable demands on meteorologists. That problem is failure to understand uncertainty, and it’s rooted in a deeper one in education. Much of the populace has little concept of, nor tolerance for, uncertainty. Too many people think everything is certain, black and white. That’s preposterous rubbish. Medicine is not as simple as that, or the coronavirus already would be exterminated. And if meteorology were that easy, we already could tell you where the tornadoes will track on May 22nd, to within mere feet.

Yet the opposite people, who declare from their high horse of “nuance” that “everything is shades of gray”, have it terribly wrong going the other way, too. They attach a damned error bar to situations that have straightforward answers, and mile-wide error bars to others that are far less complicated in reality. They declare that there are no absolutes. That is equally preposterous garbage. [Next time you see someone write, “There are no absolutes,” or “Everything is shades of gray,” please call them out on that obviously and literally self-contradictory nonsense!]

Black and white, unambiguous factual answers really do exist to a lot of things. The sun rises in the eastern sky. 2+2=4. I love Dr Pepper. Direct contact with bleach outside the body will kill this virus (and maim your insides, maybe fatally, if you drink or inhale it). Tornadoes are made of air. Male or female you were made, dear reader, by genetics, before birth, by biological fact of a chromosome pair still found in all your cells. Simple answers to complex questions and problems really do exist in some cases. Ministers of the “nuance” pulpit fail to see this, and as such, will stay mired in gray ideological mud, missing out on a lot of clarity and vivid insight that absolutes can offer.

“The best answers are found in the middle.” Preposterous rubbish too! I’m not advocating the middle ground is always right, either. Sometimes, indeed I dare say often, alternative and out-of-mainstream solutions end up working amazingly well, saving lives, bettering society. Sometimes, just sometimes, even the ideological extremes are onto something (despite that, more often than not, they’re shrill, annoying parasites sucking intellect out of an issue). If you’re always straddling the middle, trying to stay comfortable in rigid “balance”, avoiding all extremes, taking no risk, and not seeing the benefits that can arise from the unconventional thinking, you’ll miss out on so much accomplishment, discovery and innovation. Your life will be boring as hell, too. If nothing else, pay attention to the extremes, so you can understand how to combat the 90% or more of their crap that is…crap.

The key is knowing when the middle is right, when the conventional wisdom and tradition yield optimal results, when an alternative way is best, when even the extremes are right, when an issue is clear-cut, when it is gray. How? Reasoned, critical thinking — to determine when, how, and why each approach is appropriate, situationally. Situationally!

Much as the science of medicine has lots of uncertainties regarding this coronavirus — how to reverse its severe rampages in some people, how much immunity to mutations you have after you’ve had it, when there will be a vaccine and how effective it will be…so does my science. We get questions like this astoundingly often: “Will it rain on my sister’s outdoor wedding next September 10th at 4 p.m. in Aurora?” Or, “I’m driving my RV from Chicago to Miami on November 3rd. Where will I hit bad weather?” [No way to know, too much uncertainty!] Or, “Can you control tornadoes with hyper-voltage electromagnetic beams?” [No, but the questioner won’t take anything but his own pet theory for an answer.]

What insanely asinine questions those are for anyone who understands uncertainty or has half a microgram of critical-thinking skills! Yet we get them. It’s not necessarily tied to educational level, either. Some of the worst weather-control lunacy I’ve seen has come from engineers and physicists, and even one physician (not any who are personal friends of mine!). Some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories I’ve heard have been proposed by people with advanced degrees. Ph.D. can stand for Phenomenally Dumb, when outside one’s own area of expertise. There are people who are so specialized, as an old instructor of mine once stated, that they, “Learn more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.“

So why do far too many people, whether well-educated on paper or high-school dropouts, either blindly accept seeming authority without question, or reflexively reject it outright, or fail to grasp uncertainty, or think “alternative” must be bad, or think “alternative” must be best, or accept outlandish and thoroughly unreasonable crackpot ideas? Where is the ability in people to evaluate, to dissociate from emotion and other irrationalities, and to use facts, logic and reason to assess ideas and ideals independently and thoroughly?

I strongly believe it’s because critical, independent thinking skills have not been rigorously taught by both public schools and parents, as a whole, for at least 3 or 4 generations. My generation (X) is part of the problem, both on the receiving and teaching end. Parents and schools alike have failed here, miserably. Of course there are exceptions. I’m talking not about the exceptions, but the rule.

Critical thinking doesn’t lead to sucking down bleach, nor eating Tide Pods, nor snorting cocaine, nor partying with dozens of friends amidst a highly contagious pandemic, nor refusing vaccinations because some airheaded celebrity says it causes autism, nor taking essential oils to “cure” cancer, nor being a sucker to unscientific anti-GMO hysteria, nor thinking 5G makes coronavirus worse, nor HAARPing about “chemtrails”, nor sending money to that Nigerian prince who works for the IRS and Citibank and wants your credit-card number so you can pay what you owe and get rich quick.

Anybody with even the most basic critical-thinking skills would not take a verbally handicapped President’s offhanded bleach comment literally, nor a host of other dumb things said by celebrities and politicians of all stripes. Yet here we are.

Unfortunately the solution is hard: massively reform education away from the rote and toward understanding. Stop teaching to test. Don’t make students memorize; teach them how to think conceptually and critically. Stop teaching to feelings, “identity” and “self-esteem” — teach instead to logic and reason. Return to rigorous fundamentals of math, science, reading comprehension, history, and writing in education, including deep immersion in critical-thinking concepts in each of these basics. The results won’t bear fruit for another generation or two. But this is what’s needed. Until then, our society as as much at peril from a profusion of gullible suckers as from any disease.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: coronavirus, critical thinking, Donald Trump, education, forecast uncertainty, forecasting, independent thinking, logic, medicine, reason

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

Search

Recent Posts

  • Heavy Blow to Scientific Credibility
  • The Fallacy of “Compromise” with Gaslighting Forces of Tyranny
  • American Education: Emulate the Asian Model of Rigor and Effort
  • Gasoline Prices: A Layered Issue
  • Fatherhood

Categories

  • Not weather
  • Photographic Adventures
  • Scattershooting
  • Weather
  • Weather AND Not
@SkyPixWeather

- August 8, 2022, 1:35 pm

On its face, this is insane—nowhere near justification to resign. So many former (& some current) players strongly defending Cale must mean something. Never any character problems known across decades. No, something else we don’t know is afoot here. A sad day in @OU_Football https://t.co/8J3hFSbQT4
h J R
@SkyPixWeather

- August 7, 2022, 3:26 pm

@jamesaydelott @ScienzaPiccola was one of the reviewers and did an excellent job!
h J R
@SkyPixWeather

- August 7, 2022, 3:23 pm

Latest #EJSSM article: Wilson & Van Den Broeke introduce SPORK: Algorithm for operational & research identification of ZDR arcs & columns—valuable to efficient assessment/differentiation of pretornadic vs. nontornadic #supercells, & inferring hailfall. https://t.co/hNcQKtFL1S https://t.co/ioDEREiczf
h J R

Blogroll

  • CanadianTexan
  • Chuck's Chatter
  • Cliff Mass Weather & Climate
  • Digital Photography Review
  • DMN Dallas Cowboys BLOG
  • Dr. Cook's Blog
  • Dr. JimmyC
  • E-journal of Severe Storms Meteorology
  • Eloquent Science
  • Image of the Week
  • Jack's Cam Wall
  • Jim LaDue View
  • Laura Ingraham
  • MADWEATHER
  • Michelle Malkin
  • Photography Attorney
  • Severe Weather Notes
  • SkyPix by Roger Edwards
  • Tornatrix
  • With All My Mind

Meta

  • Log in