Alice Walker: “There is an attempt, fueled by corporations that sell meat, drugs, religion and other life choices, to control the population’s way of eating, worshipping, and expressing the desire to create something different.”
Alice Walker: Writing What’s Right – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics.
“Wikipedia does not want to risk some rogue editor inventing history. It relies instead on the passion of thousands of people who constantly check on each other and cite books or articles in their footnotes. It’s a fairly sophisticated version of crowd-sourcing, many people providing bits information.
And that process really bothered labor historian Timothy Messer-Kruse. He believed he had the truth, primary documents, right in his hands, but couldn’t shove it past the crowd.”
A number of studies have spotted a worrisome trend: although the number of scientific journals and articles published is increasing each year, the rate of papers being retracted as invalid is increasing even faster. Some of these are being retracted due to obvious ethical lapses—fraudulent data or plagiarism—but some past studies have suggested errors and technical problems were the cause of the majority of problems.
A new analysis, released by PNAS, shows this rosy picture probably isn’t true. Researchers like to portray their retractions as being the result of errors, but a lot of these same papers turn out to be fraudulent when fully investigated. If there’s any good news here, it’s that a limited number of labs 38, to be exact are responsible for a third of the fraudulent papers that end up being retracted.
via Research fraud exploded over the last decade | Ars Technica.
“In recognition of this week, against censorship, and in support of writers and readers, the Guernica Daily will be publishing interviews with authors whose books have been banned or challenged and essays on works of fiction that have been oft removed from schools, libraries and book stores.â€
Banned Books Week – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics.
Here’s the thing. Peer review is not perfect. It’s not a panacea. It’s simply the basic level of due diligence. By submitting work for peer review, a scientist has allowed people outside her own team to critique her work. And the journal might require some changes to the paper based on the critique — anything from edits for clarity to requesting that the scientist perform another experiment in a different way. If a paper hasn’t gone through peer review, you should be more skeptical of it. Avoiding peer review means that the researcher decided to show the public her results before allowing those results to be critiqued by independent experts.
But, at the same time, just because something has gone through peer review doesn’t mean it’s been certified to be accurate. It just means that roughly three other experts have looked at the paper before publication. There’s still a lot of room for things to go wrong. Peer review is like the bouncer at the door. The bouncer doesn’t guarantee that every person in the bar would be a good person for you to date. Even if a paper gets through, you still have to think about it critically and evaluate it on its own merits.
Of GM corn and rat tumors: Why peer reviewed doesn’t mean “accurate” – Boing Boing.