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By Jo Nova
Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.
Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.
Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on ‘breast cancer’ becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a ‘naïve Bayes’ classifier became a ‘gullible Bayes’. An ant colony was labeled an ‘underground creepy crawly state’.
And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it ‘signal to noise’. The nonsense never ends.
A ‘random forest’ is not always the same thing as an ‘irregular backwoods’ or an ‘arbitrary timberland’ — especially […]
By Jo Nova
Death cult at nine
Let’s just say, hypothetically, that someone wanted an excuse to reduce global population, or limit competing tribes and religions, there’s a scientific hat for that. Climate Change is the ultimate excuse for mass death — done in the nicest possible way and for the most honorable of reasons. But isn’t that what they all say: Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, Heavens Gate — death makes the world a better place?
The cult that pretends it isn’t a cult sells itself as “science”. I mean, what is the worst thing you can think of? Would that be one degree of warming, or the Black Death?
In Bill McQuire’s mind the catastrophe is not when billions of innocent people die.
One hundred years from now, what would our great grandchildren prefer: that the world was slightly cooler or they were never born at all? If you hate humans it’s a terrible dilemma…
Bill McGuire, vulcanologist, accidentally put his primal instincts in a tweet last weekend:
Thirty years of telling us that humans are bad has consequences. As Elon Musk said” They want a holocaust for humanity.” It turns out a televised diet of one-sided climate […]
Youtube link
By Jo Nova
Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The […]
By Jo Nova
A team of psychologists were so sure “climate deniers” deceive themselves for selfish reasons that they ran three experiments with four thousand people, only to find they were completely wrong.
The researchers figured that those who do not accept that coal makes storms and floods must be motivated by their desire to keep on polluting, or flying, or feeling warm, and so they lie to themselves about the science in order to feel OK about it. (A bit like academics must do when it turns out they get paid well, but don’t know their research topic at all, maybe?)
It must have been quite the shock when Zimmermann and Stötzer were proved wrong on every single experiment. They even tried to bribe skeptics with $20 cash rewards and it still wasn’t enough.
Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results
Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves […]
Image by Donna Kirby from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
University degrees aren’t what they used to be
After years of universities turning out smug self-obsessed graduates of Woke ideology, Big Business has realized they might be better off hiring people with experience in the real world instead. They are also doing their own testing — with 2 out of 3 setting their own test assignments for candidates.
This year more than half of the 800 employers surveyed had already dropped bachelor degree requirements for at least some of their roles. It must have worked out, because next year almost all of those same companies plan on dropping the requirement for even more roles. That looks like a trend…
This surely must be ringing some warning bells in a few Ivory Towers? Fewer students, means less income, less influence, and fewer alumni:
How the college degree lost its value: Nearly half of US companies plan to ax Bachelor’s degree requirements – after Walmart, Accenture and IBM led the charge
DailyMail
Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor’s degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed.
Someone who knows what life in a poor country and what having children means explains why Woke Culture has gone too far to young people at the Oxford Union.
The only thing Wokeness has to offer in exchange is to brainwash bright minds like you that you are victims and to complain, to protest, to throw soup on paintings.
Konstantine Kisin is a British satirist, author, and commentator who was born and raised in Moscow.
9.7 out of 10 based on 91 ratings
By Jo Nova (and UPDATED)
Across all branches of science, new ideas that reset the paradigms have quietly vanished
The spark never started in the star-ideas that should have shone, and we find ourselves suddenly under a dark sky, looking up at a galaxy of burnt gravy, thinking something is missing. As dominant paradigms became entrenched in every field of science, the great new replacement ideas starved.
Nature might as well have labeled this “A graph of Original Thought at University”
It’s like some sole giant entity infected every area of science and crushed original thinkers.
‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why
Disruptive science sounds like something impossible to measure, but the researchers found way to test for the arrival of new papers that replace past paradigms. Genius discoveries may still have happened, but no one picked them up.
The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead would cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, the researchers calculated a measure of disruptiveness, called the CD index, in which […]
We’re sacking Vaccine Professors for not taking the right vaccine?
Who knew? The first traditional vaccine for Covid that’s based on protein anywhere in the world has been approved for use. It was designed in Australia, but can’t be used here. The Professor of the team that invented it received no help from the Australian Government, and is about to be sacked from Flinders Medical Centre** because he won’t take the mandatory Pfizer, Astra Zenica or Moderna injections. What would he know — he’s just a vaccine developer?
UPDATE: The SA Govt will now recognise the Covax-19 trial participants. This is a small step but good news. Prof Petrovsky won’t be forced to quit.
Instead of the committee-approved ones, has taken his own vaccine called Covax-19 or Spikogen. It has just been approved for use in Iran where Stage 2 and 3 trials were conducted. He said he would stand by his vaccine and even accept liability, unlike all the current vaccine makers who demand waivers.
Professor Nikolai Petrovsky is hopeful though, that after “the excellent Phase 3 trial results” he will be able to get approval in many countries, maybe even in Australia? But our government-funded […]
James Cook University won a Pyrrhic victory at the High Court today. By spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars (how many exactly?), all they have proven is that we can’t trust any research done by that university.
Even if the professors there are being sincere and honest, we will never know whether they are only telling us what their Vice Chancellor, Supreme Ruler Sandra Harding, wants them to say. The government should not be funding this sort of institution. It serves its administration, not the Australian taxpayer.
Two years ago, JCU had already spent $600,000 to make sure all their staff know they can’t criticize the uni.
Peter Ridd was JCU’s best asset until they sacked him. He helped expose manipulated photos of reef fish by a JCU researcher, Oona Lönnstedt, who had already been caught fabricating data in Sweden. Yet JCU “investigated” and sacked Ridd faster than it investigated her suspicious lionfish shots.
Every JCU employee’s work is tainted by this. We will never know what any JCU researcher really thinks, or which results were dropped in the bin, no matter what they say, because we know employees of JCU will be afraid to report bad behaviour, fraud, […]
A postmodern coal-powered Cockatoo is larger, meaner and nastier than any bird photographed in the paleolithic. | Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash
It’s a new horror to scare the kiddies:
Animals ‘shape-shifting’ as climate warms: study
Paris: Some animals are “shape-shifting” and have developed bigger tails, beaks and ears to regulate their body temperatures as the planet warms, according to a new study.
The Australian parrot, for example, had shown an average 4-10 per cent increase in the size of its bill since 1871 and the authors said this positively correlated with the summer temperature each year.
For one, do bird-bills cool birds? For two, how many parrot bills were measured in 1871 in Australia and do we think we would know if their bills got 10% bigger? For three, there is no “Australian parrot”, there are 56 different species. And fourthly, even if they had got bigger, and we could measure that, which we probably can’t, how do we know it’s not due to “something else” that changed in the last 150 years, like all the orchards, crops, trees and other things we planted? According to some botanists, there are more foreign plants […]
Well here’s a surprise. A year and a half later and now we find out that Australian labs were also helping China?
And tonight, 520 days after China shared the genetic sequence of SARS-2, Australian scientists are suddenly very concerned about how Australia might still be doing gain-of-function work with viruses? Minister Greg Hunt is asking for a “review” of gain-of-function research in Australia? Did he even know?
It’s amazing what the power of a good reporter can achieve. Hail Sharri Markson and The Australian.
For 500 long pandemic days some publicly funded scientists had millions of reasons apparently, not to talk about how the virus might have been a lab leak. These public servants may have been publicly scoffing at the idea the virus may have leaked from a lab, but they didn’t think to mention that they’d worked with bats, and gain-of-function viruses and even the Wuhan lab itself?
They were ethically bound to speak up. Did they say nothing, or did they talk to Morrison and Hunt in private? After which, given the government’s role, possibly none of them wanted to let that bat out of the bag?
Public trust in these institutions might be about to […]
When only the best will do:
Babylon Bee
“I thought I knew all there was to know about communist indoctrination, but I was wrong,” said the ruthless dictator to reporters after sitting through a 2-hour lecture on why fidget spinners are a remnant of Western patriarchal oppression. “Your American college professors have this down to an art!” …
The murderous leader of North Korea plans to go back to his home country and start his own Ivy League school: Kim Jong UNiversity.
Thanks to the Babylon Bee. Click the logo to read the rest.
9.9 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
Some Australian researchers visiting China turned out to be effectively Chinese researchers funded by Australians.
What does it mean to be an Australian citizen paid by Australian taxpayers if it’s “OK” to take $150,000 extra from the CCP, plus benefits for the wife and kids, and in some cases also keep that a secret from the Uni in Australia that they work for? How about having a cloned research project in China studying the same high tech topics and producing patents owned by the Chinese government? The “Thousand Talents Plan” has been described by FBI director Christopher Wray as “economic espionage”. It includes military technology, drone automation, AI, biotech, and many high tech areas. To put a fine point on it, some of these researchers are signing up to agreements to obey Chinese laws, and which require them to ask permission from the CCP before they disclose these arrangements to their Australian employers.
We might be tempted to call this all sort of names, but this sort of activity is apparently legal. It’s just a loophole being exploited.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s new report: Hunting the phoenix: The Chinese Communist Party’s search for technology and talent.
Remember Peter Ridd […]
Add Susan Crockford’s name to the list of scientists being tossed out of the academic cathedral because they dare speak the truth. University of Victoria give no reasons for suddenly ending her long unpaid role as adjunct professor, but if they had evidence of incompetence, misinformation, deceit or poor performance, you can be sure they would say so.
The academic casualty list includes Peter Ridd, Bob Carter, Murry Salby, Bjorn Lomborg, David Legates, Nick Drapela, Pat Michaels, Mitchell Taylor, and now Susan Crockford. Outside academia those expunged from screens include David Bellamy, Johnny Ball, Phillip Vernier. Forced out of institutes were Caleb Rossiter and Lennart Bengtsson. The threat of RICO investigations drove Roger Pielke into a different career. Read “my unhappy life as a climate heretic“. Likewise Al Gore sacked Will Happer.
Others put up with the bullying and stay silent til they retire like Dr Rex Fleming from NOAA or they report anonymously after working for 40 years at the National Weather Service. Sometimes the bullying even follows people home, like Dr Fisher, economist and former ABARE manager who’s house was egged. All he did was model the costs of climate policies. Art Robinson ran for Congress and his […]
JCU protects reputations not the reef
….
Despite losing on all 17 points in a case that should never have gone to trial —
Sarah Elks, The Australian:
James Cook University is appealing a decision … Federal Court documents reveal JCU has briefed one of Australia’s top barristers, Bret Walker SC, to argue it was legal for the north Queensland university to sack Dr Ridd last year after he publicly criticised its climate change science.
Physics professor Dr Ridd will on Monday launch an online bid for crowd-funding to help pay his legal costs, asking for an extra $1.5m, after supporters already tipped in $260,000 to help fund his unfair dismissal claim. Dr Ridd has spent $200,000 of his own money.
“It’s diabolically expensive because we expect it to go all the way to the High Court,” he said. “In the end, this is a battle for academic freedom. It’s about not allowing universities to stifle free speech.
James Cook Uni will dig deeper into taxpayer funds instead of doing research, in order to protect the reputation of overpaid bureaucrats:
Liberal senator James Paterson tells Alan Jones: “It looks like, so […]
Peter Ridd in Brisbane getting ready for the trial.
Peter Ridd’s court case is set for 26 to 28th March in Brisbane. He invites you to watch the proceedings (Jennifer Marohasy says she’ll be there, all three days!). Go on…
If James Cook Uni (JCU) wins, they lose. Whatever happens, the taxpayer lost a long time ago.
On a philosophical note, in my opinion JCU will lose the ethical argument even if they manage to win on some narrow legal definition. If they win, it will mean that a judge has decided that a university has set up legally binding contracts that give them the power to effectively take away the right to intellectual freedom of an academic and silence him/her. That would be something of a pyrrhic victory. The university hierarchy may feel vindicated but the general public, especially those in North Queensland who are most affected by the questionable Great Barrier Reef science, will take a different view. But without getting over-confident, I reckon the chances of us winning are considerably above average, so we will see. — Peter Ridd, March 2019
Ridd’s employment contract says he has the right to speak freely, […]
Third World Science with First World Funding
Is James Cook University a grants machine or a research institute?
James Cook University reviews ex-student’s ‘fishy’ findings, by Graham Lloyd, The Australian
Oona Lönnstedt has been prolific, writing alarming papers on microplastics, acidification, and reef degradation. But her work looks like a trainwreck. One paper has been withdrawn, in another it was “found that Lonnstedt did not have time to undertake the research she claimed.” She’s been found guilty of fabricating data on the microplastics study. Now Peter Ridd has pointed out that the photos of 50 Lionfish appear to contain a lot less than 50 fish. Images have been flipped, spun or “manipulated” so the same fish appears more than once.
James Cook has done what any ambitious, money-hungry grant troughing institute would do, a very slow investigation of allegedly corrupt behaviour and a very quick sacking of the honest researcher who threatens to expose them. Any respectable Science Minister would freeze all grants to James Cook until this situation was resolved and reversed.
Send your thoughts to The Hon Karen Andrews. Contact her here: karen.andrews.mp AT aph.gov.au. There is a crisis in Australian science. Who is going to […]
So smart and yet so stupid
Global Warming for the Two Cultures by Richard Lindzen
Prof Richard Lindzen, a giant of the skeptical debate delivered the 2018 Annual GWPF lecture this week talking about two cultures of two different educated elites. Those at the higher intellectual level may be more prone to groupthink than ordinary folk…
The two different kinds of elites and a vast gap between them
Lindzen quotes C.P.Snow who was both a scientist and a writer and who lived in both elite worlds — the scientific and the arts.
C.P. Snow felt only 1 in 10 of the most highly educated in the western world had even a basic grip on physics:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have […]
Hear Ye!
To all the world’s recalcitrant, absent, and neglectful parents, paediatricians have arrived to tell you to give your kids a drink during a heatwave, pack food to last through droughts, and that you really need global unaccountable committees to look after your kids. Presumably their junkets meetings will be paid for by you.
Kids are “underprioritized”? (So what do they think 2 billion parents are doing?) Children are highly vulnerable to health risks of a changing climate
“…researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center set out some specific challenges associated with the impacts of climate change on the world’s 2.3 billion children and suggest ways to address their under-prioritized needs.“
Researchers discovered children have “anatomic, cognitive, immunologic, and psychologic differences” which put them at more risk than adults. OK. They’ve noticed kids are small and inexperienced. Ambitiously, they apply this to 2.3 billion children, pretty much all of them here on Earth. That’s your kids, mine, “under prioritized”. Hmm.
The finding that children are vulnerable will shock all the parents who assumed their kids would survive the next flood, malaria, and dengue outbreak without any help. What will […]
The university grant engine is just a part of the whole Green Scare Machine. Click to enlarge.
Science Funding is monopsonistic, one-sided and poses a real threat to science. Governments are strangling research. The more money governments throw at politicized science, the tighter the deadly grip.
Read the cutting commentary from Don Aitkin — the former vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra and foundation chairman of the Australian Research Council. There’s a vested interest here, rarely discussed, that has ballooned in the last thirty years to billions of dollars.
In The Australian and on Aitken’s blog
Don’t you Dare Upset The Money Making Machine
The engine works this way. There is strong pressure on all academics to bring in research grant money for the department, the faculty and university. Those who do it well find their careers advancing quickly. To assist them there are media sections in universities whose job it is to frame the research work of academics in a way that will gain the attention of the media. Such media releases will come with as arresting a headline as the media section can devise. Buzzwords like ‘breakthrough’, ‘crucial’, ‘cutting edge’ and ‘revolution’ will […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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