Paul M. Jones

Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers -- a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature.

Other studies have suggested that most of these retractions resulted from honest errors. But a deeper analysis of retractions, being published this week, challenges that comforting assumption.

In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause.

via Study Finds Misconduct Widespread in Retracted Scientific Papers - NYTimes.com.

Lynette Lee of Clarksville, Tennessee first told police on November 23 that she had been raped in a hotel room by a man she had met through the dating website MeetMe.com. “Lee said once at the hotel the man removed her clothes and, despite her protests, had sex with her,” according to newschannel5.com.

The rape suspect told police that his sexual experience with Lee was consensual. But apparently it was nothing to write home about.

Lee asked police to drop the rape case four days later, on Nov. 27, claiming that she lied about the rape because “she did not enjoy (the sexual encounter) and it was bad,” according to police.

Be careful reading the original article; it has a picture of the woman who lied. My eyes! My eyes! Via Woman claimed rape because the sex was bad | The Daily Caller.

The New York City homeless man – whose gift of boots from an NYPD police officer became an online sensation last week  – is back on the streets with no shoes.

The New York Times found him Sunday night wandering barefoot in Manhattan. The paper identified him as Jeffrey Hillman, formerly of South Plainfield, N.J.

Asked about the $100 all-weather boots Officer Larry DePrimo gave him on Nov. 14, Hillman says he’s hidden them because “they are worth a lot of money.”

He says he’s grateful for the gift, but he wants “a piece of the pie” because the photo was posted online “without permission.”

“I was put on YouTube, I was put on everything without permission,” he added. “What do I get?”

When you give people free stuff, they usually don't value it as much as when they earn it themselves. Via Homeless Man Behind Viral NYPD Photo Now Shoeless Again, Demanding ‘Piece of the Pie’ | TheBlaze.com.

UPDATE: We also need to realize that the NYPD guy did not actually help the homeless man here. He doesn't appear to be better off. But the NYPD guy feels better about himself for having "done something," and *you* feel like a good person for approving of it. That's what a lot of charity ends up being: a way to make you feel better about yourself, not a way to do actual good in the world. If you want to feel better about yourself, fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're doing real good -- *unless* you follow up with individual persons you helped, afterwards, and see how they're doing. Real life-changing charity work is difficult to do.

Men are taught repeatedly that what women want are gestures of investment, commitment, and love.  Give her flowers, buy her an expensive dinner, write her a love letter, etc.

In fact these are things women want, but they don’t want them from just any man.  They want them from a man they are attracted to.  If you think about women’s fantasies as represented in romance novels, etc. you will see that women don’t fantasize about having a bevy of ordinary men falling over themselves to give her the most thoughtful gift.  Women fantasize about winning the heart of the dashing hero, and ultimately having him acknowledge this with tokens of his investment, commitment, and love.  These tokens give her comfort that she isn’t hopelessly pursuing an unavailable man.  She wants him to feel too good to be true, but she also wants some reassurance that she isn’t just being conned.

What men are being taught is to skip the hero part and go straight to the expression of love.  They are taught to offer comfort as a way to build attraction, instead of building attraction first and then offering comfort.  It is no wonder that this not only doesn’t work, but often fails spectacularly.

...

Women wanting a man to lead them is counterintuitive given that we live in a fully feminist age. But there is a difference between what women say and think they want in a man, and what their subconscious wants. Ignore the fundamentals of human psychology at your peril.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing. Via Romance 101: How to stop frustrating your wife. | Dalrock.

Here are the slides from my presentation at PHP Brazil 2012 this morning:

It’s interesting how some of those who most vociferously object to government interference in our economic affairs are most desirous of government interference in our personal ones.

I’m referring of course to social conservatives, who want to legislate our morals and values according to their views.

To be clear, I am quite sympathetic to the social conservative argument on abortion. Life, it appears to me, does begin at the moment of conception. (I can’t think of another time.) And at whatever phase of pregnancy an abortion occurs, a choice must be made between human lives, a horrible, and perforce immoral, situation.

I am less sympathetic to the social conservative position on same-sex marriage, which seems to me a civil rights issue.

But hold your tongues (and you blog comments) for a moment. Arguing my positions on these issues is not my intention here.

My point is: The social issues, whatever your position, are best dealt with outside the governmental realm.

Emphasis in original. Via Roger L. Simon » ‘Mind Your Own Beeswax!’: How Social Conservatives Can Win By Losing.

The Aura Project for PHP 5.4 is happy to announce its first release of 1.0.0 stable library packages. The packages include:

• Aura.Autoload
• Aura.Cli
• Aura.Di
• Aura.Http
• Aura.Marshal
• Aura.Router
• Aura.Signal
• Aura.Sql
• Aura.Uri
• Aura.View
• Aura.Web

In addition, we have initial beta releases of three new libarary packages:

• Aura.Filter
• Aura.Intl
• Aura.Session

Each library package is independent of all the others, so you can pick and choose which ones you want to use. With few exceptions, each class in each package has 100% PHPUnit test coverage. Each package has a full README for getting started. They all have a composer.json file and are registered at Packagist.

While the above packages are completely independent of each other, Aura also has a Framework package that binds them all together. Releasing the next version of that Framework and system skeleton is the next thing for us to do.

You can learn more about the Aura Project at http://auraphp.github.com, and please be sure to join our mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/auraphp.

Update: I originally reported that Aura.Uri was a beta package; it is in fact stable.

When reading documentation, manuals, narratives, instructions, tutorials, and the like, I frequently see phrases like: "If you want to do X, simply ..." and then several steps of instructions. Or, "In order to do Z, just do this, that and the other."

You don't need the words "simply" and "just" in your writing. If the instructions are simple, they will *look* simple. If they are not, using "simply" and "just" indicates that the writer *wants you to think* they are easy. They are marketing words, reflecting the way the author wants you to think about the work, and are not descriptive of the work itself. Eliminate these words (and their various variations) from your writing, and your meaning will be much clearer.

The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion to the relative threat it presents. That’s especially true when it comes to Islamic-extremist terror. Of the 150,000 murders in the U.S. between 9/11 and the end of 2010, Islamic extremism accounted for fewer than three dozen. Since 2000, the chance that a resident of the U.S. would die in a terrorist attack was one in 3.5 million, according to John Mueller and Mark Stewart of Ohio State and the University of Newcastle, respectively. In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism resulted in just 200 to 400 deaths worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq--the same number, Mueller noted in a 2011 report (PDF), as die in bathtubs in the U.S. alone each year.

…According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in “toll and physical damage,” while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion.

...

Something that I would love to see the Transportation Security Administration, the FBI, the CIA, and whoever else do is pull together an estimate of how many airplanes they think would have been blown up by terrorists if there was no passenger or baggage screening whatsoever. One way of thinking about it is this. If commercial airplanes were no more secure than your average city bus, planes would be blown up as frequently as city buses--which is to say never. I’ve heard some people postulate that terrorists have a special affection for blowing up planes, but I’m not sure that’s right. In the not-too-distant past, Israel had a substantial terrorists-blowing-up-buses problem and had to take countervailing security measures. But unlike Israel, we’re not doing anything to secure our buses. It’s at least possible that nobody blows up American buses because nobody is trying to blow anything up.

via The High Price of False Security.

Civics teachers talk as if politics is about policy, that politics is our system for choosing policies to deal with common problems.  But as Tyler Cowen suggests, real politics seems to be more about who will be our leaders, and what coalitions will rise or fall in status as a result.  Election media coverage focuses on characterizing the candidates themselves – their personalities, styles, friends, beliefs, etc.  You might say this is because character is a cheap clue to the policies candidates would adopt, but I don’t buy it.

The obvious interpretation seems more believable – as with high school class presidents, we care about policies mainly as clues to candidate character and affiliations.  And to the extent we consider policies not tied to particular candidates, we mainly care about how policies will effect which kinds of people will be respected how much.

For example, we want nationalized medicine so poor sick folks will feel cared for, military actions so foreigners will treat us with respect, business deregulation as a sign of respect for hardworking businessfolk, official gay marriage as a sign we accept gays, and so on.

via Overcoming Bias : Politics isn’t about Policy.