- Unusual fermented foods, such as shio koji (fermented salt, sort of)
- David Healy talk about problems with evidence-based medicine. Example of Simpson’s paradox in suicide rates.
- The ten worst mistakes of DSM-5. This is miserably argued. The author has two sorts of criticisms: 1. Narrow a diagnosis (e.g., autism): People who need treatment won’t get it! 2. Widen a diagnosis (e.g., depression) or add a new one (many examples): This will cause fads and over-medication! It isn’t clear how to balance the two goals (helping people get treatment, avoiding fads and over-medication) nor why the various changes being criticized will produce more bad than good. Allen Frances, the author, was chair of the committee in charge of DSM-4. He could have written: “When we wrote DSM-4, we made several mistakes . . . . The committee behind DSM-5 has not learned from our mistakes. . . .” That would have been more convincing. That the chair of the committee behind DSM-4, in spite of feeling strongly about it, cannot persuasively criticize DSM-5 speaks volumes.
- The Lying Dutchman. “Very few social psychologists make stuff up, but he was working in a discipline where cavalier use of data was common. This is perhaps the main finding of the three Dutch academic committees which investigated his fraud. The committees found many bad practices: researchers who keep rerunning an experiment until they get the right result, who omit inconvenient data, misunderstand statistics, don’t share their data, and so on.”
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December 24th, 2012 at 6:17 am
The Lying Dutchman link is broken
Seth: I fixed it.
December 24th, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Txomin: you could try typing
The sin of bad science
into google and then click on the FT link: you can then read this article without wrestling with their paywall.
December 24th, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Thanks for the link on shio koji! I see it in the stores all the time but never stopped to ask what it was or how it could be used.
December 24th, 2012 at 4:35 pm
Thank you.
December 25th, 2012 at 12:39 am
http://www.88-bar.com/2012/12/where-are-all-the-creative-chinese-people-hanging-out-in-hacker-spaces-apparently/