פרסומים אחרונים במדור "מדע"

"What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. As pointed out in the blog, and earlier by Andrew Gelman, there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. We also cited Overall (1969) for showing “that the prevalence of studies deficient in statistical power is not only wasteful but actually pernicious: it results in a large proportion of invalid rejections of the null hypothesis among published results.” Our article was written in 1969 and published in 1971, but I failed to internalize its message."

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.”

Quite remarkably, Herrick managed to describe the world’s first heart attack in 1912 and then, without missing a beat, he immediately knew that strict bed rest was an essential form of treatment – for a condition never before described: "The patient is to be guarded by day and night nursing and helped in every way to avoid voluntary movement, or effort."
...

Why six weeks? I suspect this time period slipped over from orthopaedics, where it generally takes a broken bone about six weeks to heal. Bones and heart muscle, pretty much the same thing aren’t they?

The reality is that strict bed rest killed millions of people over a fifty year period from 1912 to around the mid 1960s.

You may wonder how bed rest is so deadly. Well, there are two main ways it can kill you. First, lying in bed stationary for six weeks means that there is a damned good chance of developing a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in the legs. Secondly, without any exercise, and especially after a heart attack, the heart degenerates very rapidly. It becomes weaker, and deadly heart rhythms develop.

- **Complaint against Harvard for antisemitism**:

The plaintiffs, Alexander Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism, Inc., allege that Harvard University has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating and maintaining a hostile environment for Jewish students, and by discriminating against them on the basis of their race, color, or national origin.

- **Examples of antisemitic incidents at Harvard**:

The complaint details numerous incidents of antisemitic harassment, intimidation, violence, and propaganda perpetrated by students, faculty, and administrators at Harvard.

- **Harvard's failure to respond or discipline the perpetrators**:

The complaint accuses Harvard of being deliberately indifferent to, and even enabling of, the antisemitic conduct on its campus, by refusing to enforce its own policies, by failing to protect Jewish students from harm, by hiring and promoting professors who spread antisemitic propaganda, by accepting donations from sources that promote antisemitism, and by applying a double standard that singles out Jews and Israel for condemnation and criticism.

- **Remedies sought by the plaintiffs**:

The complaint seeks injunctive relief, including requiring Harvard to implement institutional, far-reaching, and concrete remedial measures to address and prevent antisemitism on its campus.

I had it coming.