Month: September 2019

Paper Americans discover that not everyone is inclined to pretend that paper is thicker than blood:

Two young Americans, Victor and Cynthia Liu, are “trapped” in China, increasingly desperate and despondent because Chinese authorities have blocked them from leaving for more than a year.

“They are trapped. They are alone. They are desperate to come home,” David Pressman, the siblings’ New York-based attorney, told USA TODAY. “They are literally breaking down.”

The Lius are subject to a so-called “exit ban,” and they’re not they only ones.

Another American citizen, Huang Wan, says Chinese officials are using a “fake” legal case to prevent her from returning to the United States. An Australian resident, Yuan Xiaoliang, has been barred from leaving China for more than eight months, and her husband, an Australian citizen, has been arrested on suspicion of spying, according to Australia’s foreign minister.

The State Department has warned Americans about China’s growing use of exit bans – stating in a Jan. 3 travel advisory that Chinese authorities have sometimes used exit bans to keep Americans in China for years…. Thomas Kellogg, executive director of the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University Law Center, said China has long used exit bans to stop its own citizens from leaving the country, particularly human-rights activists or other dissidents. But authorities are increasingly using the tactic to harass Americans and other foreign nationals, particularly those of Chinese descent, he said.

What defines a man? Is it is his paperwork? Or is it his DNA? It’s extremely informative to see who is on the side of science and the truth and who is not. The obvious and relevant logic dictates that one cannot simply declare a Chinese man to be an “American” due to his beliefs any more than one can declare a man to be a “woman” or a “fish” on that basis.

The reproducibility crisis in scientistry is even worse than we science skeptics had thought.

Science is facing a “reproducibility crisis” where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, research suggests. This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon.

From his lab at the University of Virginia’s Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.

“The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that should be easy. Experiments are supposed to be replicable.

The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions.

Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.

After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies’ findings.

Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result…. According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70{ca04638509ab7618004169842ba062d20ec7073b69e1f0489735ce6a44ff3be4} of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments.

Science is not a metric for truth or reality. One should NEVER rely upon scientists’ opinions about anything, because when science is actually reliable, we call it ENGINEERING.

When the gold standard is forty percent, you might as well rely upon flipping a coin.