Link blog: science, medicine, criticism, fantasy

[nameandnature]

Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness | Magazine

The controversy surrounding the proposed new edition of the DSM.
(tags: psychology science criticism dsm)

YouTube - The Lord of the Books of the 55 Arse-Hymens of Stone

Lord of the Rings audio book mashup. Horribly NSFW on the audio, utterly juvenile, hilarious. Via mefi
(tags: funny mashup lotr tolkein lord-of-the-rings fantasy audio)

YouTube - BBC Newsnight: UK Homeopathy Update 2011

Society of Homeopaths gets spanked on Newsnight, with a well deserved opportunity for revenge by Simon Singh.
(tags: homeopathy quackery medicine science simon-singh Newsnight)

The Last Psychiatrist: Wakefield And The Autism Fraud-- The Other Part Of The Story

Wakefield's a fraud, but that's not the end of the story: why did it take so long to spot it?
(tags: science peer-review journalism autism mmr wakefield vaccine vaccination medicine)

Comments

[lisekit.livejournal.com]

why did it take so long to spot it?

Here is my peer review story. Two senior academic colleagues of mine working in physics were asked to review the work of another. They were given two options: to rate the work as "highly significant" or as "very significant". So we spent some time at lunch batting back and forth over what the difference between "highly" and "very" might be, but of course the real problem was that in truth, the two reviewers felt the work was in fact "not significant at all". But there wasn't a ticky-box for that opinion.

Furthermore, both reviewers felt that it would be a bad idea to tick such a box in any case, because that would imply that the area of study itself was insignificant, and as it was their own area they didn't want to say that. So in the end they went for "very". Even though this was an inaccurate representation of what they thought.

That is why peer review as an evaluative practice may, in fact, simply suck.