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2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

After working at Theranos Inc. for eight months, Tyler Shultz decided he had seen enough. On April 11, 2014, he emailed company founder Elizabeth Holmes to complain that Theranos had doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks. The reply was withering. Ms. Holmes forwarded the email to Theranos President Sunny Balwani, who belittled Mr. Shultz’s grasp of basic mathematics and his knowledge of laboratory science, and then took a swipe at his relationship with George Shultz, the former secretary of state and a Theranos director. “The only reason I have taken so much time away from work to address this...

While eating at a restaurant in west central Pennsylvania on 10/27/2016 I noticed a man reading a large pile of newspaper clippings. Having subscribed to a clipping service years ago, it was obvious the neatly cut and folded news articles had come from such a service. The man was a Democrat in some capacity, based on a brief interaction, that was displeased with the amount of free advertising that Trump had received.

There could be a very serious problem with the past 15 years of research into human brain activity, with a new study suggesting that a bug in fMRI software could invalidate the results of some 40,000 papers. That's massive, because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the best tools we have to measure brain activity, and if it’s flawed, it means all those conclusions about what our brains look like

Unfortunately it took a scandalous retraction three years later to admit it as the study's authors originally reported that the results indicated that conservatives had psychotic personality traits and liberals had traits associated with high social desirability.  This much-touted research study in fact revealed just the opposite: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was...

Announcing the Net Data Directory Posted on June 02, 2016 by Rebekah Heacock Jones Filed under: Internet Monitor The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is delighted to announce the launch of the Net Data Directory, a free, publicly available, searchable database of different sources of data about the Internet. The directory is intended to make finding useful quantitative data about a broad range of Internet-related topics—broadband, cybersecurity, freedom of expression, and more—easier for researchers, policymakers, journalists, and the public. "A large number of organizations are producing data about all different facets of the Internet," said Fernando Bermejo, Berkman Center...

This past June, American academia went into an uproar over Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget in Wisconsin,....Specifically,any professor in the system—tenured or not—could be dismissed or laid off by the 18-member Board of Regents using maddeningly vague criteria:“when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance,curtailment,modification or redirection.”This,when combined with the faculty’s diminished role in governing the university—and thus determining such things as which programs should continue, be curtailed, or get modified—basically meant that these regents—16 of whom were appointed by Walker—could fire anyone,at any time, for any reason.[SNIP]Professors do not want...

[SNIP]The diminution of the Big Idea isn’t easy to accept,even for those willing to concede that there are major problems in their field.An ego depletion optimist might acknowledge that psychology studies tend to be too small to demonstrate a real effect,or that scientists like to futz around with their statistics until the answers come out right.(None of this implies deliberate fraud;just that sloppy standards prevail.)Still,the optimist would say,it seems unlikely that such mistakes would propagate so thoroughly throughout a single literature,and that so many noisy,spurious results could line up quite so perfectly.If all these successes came about by random chance,then...

A U.S. government that once famously spent $2.6 million to encourage Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly is capable of almost anything. Members of Congress often use these stories about absurd taxpayer-funded studies to make fun of the bureaucracy. Instead of just mocking silly studies, maybe they should put a stop to them.

How big ARE New York's rats? Researcher catches one-and-a-half pound rodent three times the size of a normal beast "...'I've caught rats all over the city, and I've seen the ones that I didn't catch. I think it's among the biggest that live in New York City,' said Matt Combs of Fordham University. [snip] One of the largest rats ever reported in New York City was a huge beast dubbed Master Splinter by the Twitter user that first posted a picture of it. The enormous rat was found in a Footlocker store in the Bronx in 2012, according to Twitter...

Catechism of the Catholic Church A resource for your research

John Lott: Even Liberal Academics Are Turning Pro-Gun Ownership From the left and right, people are bombarded with diametrically opposing claims on guns. But most of this bombardment isn’t coming from the National Rifle Association. Michael Bloomberg is spending far more money — hundreds of millions of dollars — trying to convince Americans that guns should be kept out of the hands of even law-abiding citizens. And yet, by double-digit margins, Americans say that they feel safer if more people in their neighborhood own guns. The answer is the same on concealed carry. Most of the media are doing their...

A scientific researcher who has been studying the Zika virus and its possible link to brain abnormalities in babies says legalized abortion hindered his research. The mosquito-borne virus, a growing concern in South America, is believed to be linked to microcephaly, a neurological disorder where a baby’s head is significantly smaller and the brain is abnormally developed, according to the Mayo Clinic. The condition is not typically fatal, but it can cause health problems throughout the baby’s life. The World Health Organization reports that the relationship between the virus and microcephaly has not been confirmed yet but is highly suspected....

Barack Obama is not really changing gun law. He can't. What he IS doing is creating more jobs for the FBI and BATF and increasing the manpower of both agencies for future use. Also, he is stirring people to anger to be able to mark those who react the most for future reference as well. Don't play the game.

This week, millions of people around the world will no doubt experience rapid mimicry-an involuntary, split-second mirroring of another person's facial expressions-as they exchange smiles over gifts, good meals and holiday traditions. This phenomenon, observed in humans and many other primates, is considered a basic building block of our ability to feel empathy. "When your companion or friend smiles, you don't know why exactly, but you immediately react with the same smile to him or her," says Elisabetta Palagi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pisa in Italy. "It’s an extremely important phenomenon, because through this mimicry you can...

Speaking at an event for women in Los Angeles this week, Barbra Streisand complained that society is so misogynistic, even female laboratory mice are being discriminated against. "Gender discrimination drives me crazy," said the multiple Grammy and Academy award-winning actress and singer. "Women are still treated as second-class citizens when it comes to equal pay in the workplace and equal representation in Congress." [Snip] Streisand, who has made contributions toward heart disease research for nearly three decades, then spoke out about gender inequality in medical research. "Gender inequality even extends to mice in the labs," she said. "They're all male!"...

Yesterday the president of the University of Missouri resigned because student pressure and a hunger striker and some faculty in the football team all asked for the president's resignation. The University of Missouri has a long-standing history of racism. Over five years ago one of the students from UM held an open mic in Columbia, Missouri that our organization hosted. Her poem was about racism. Similarly, in our community, the University of Colorado has a long history of discrimination against people with lived experience of recovery from mental health labels. One Colorado advocate has made attempts for over 20 years...

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think… When you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change. It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the...

For years you've been telling your friends, family, co-workers and anyone who will listen that you're addicted to cheese. It's a part of every meal or snack, and you think about it constantly. According to a new study from the University of Michigan, cheese crack is a real thing. And so is your addiction. The study, published in the U.S. National Library of Medicine, examines why certain foods are more addictive than others. Researchers identified addictive foods from about 500 students who completed the Yale Food Addiction Scale, designed to measure if someone has a food addiction. Pizza, unsurprisingly, came...

Inflation expectations, as well as median one-year ahead expected growth in the costs of several commodities (food, housing, medical, college education) are all at or near their lowest levels since the start of the survey in June 2013. Median earnings growth and household spending growth expectations decreased sharply from the prior month. Median expected spending growth is more than a percentage point below its June 2015 level and has reached a new series low.