For What Your Research Dollar Pays

I try to keep abreast when time permits at work with advancements in medicine and research. Partly, this was spurred because one of our electricians came to ask me about some stuff I did in graduate school. I was kind of taken aback, but not as much as I was about how completely unnewsworthy this research was.

According to the Journal "Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research" people who tailgate are more likely to get drunk than people who do not. Did they really need a study for that? Who got a PhD for this?

Don't even get me started on their 'scientific method'...

We conducted BAC tests of 362 adult attendees following 13 baseball games and three football games. We ran multivariate analyses to obtain factors associated with the risk of having a higher BAC.

Your tax dollars at work help some kid get an advanced degree. I could have told you this without collecting any data, but it's nice to know I'm right.

Bad Premise=Bad Science

I am not honestly surprised to read that the study linking autism to MMR vaccines is a fraud. The assumption is often made that the subjects are 'normal' when that is either a complete fabrication or when what we assume normal to be is far from it. Face it, there are really no 'normal' people. They might be 'normal' for something, but that's not necessarily the case.

I have seen a lot of people exclude outliers because they're too far from the normal. They might be the most interesting subjects.

When I worked in industry briefly, we had this 'standard' that we used in our R&D work. This person was supposedly normal, but the sample was for Factor V bloodwork, not for Trisomy 21. We assumed that the person was normal, but we really don't know.

In this case, the authors of the study purposely deceived people and used subjects who were not 'normal'. Besides that, they only studied 12 children? Please.

Don't accept their premise. It is useless to theorize until you collect the facts. Otherwise, you start bending the facts to match the premise, which is basically the underlying fault of all scientific endeavors of which I am aware. They start with a premise and then look for evidence. Too bad. People plan their lives around these findings, many of which prove false, and so we alter things that were just fine before we began.

Conventional Wisdom

I haven't written on here in a while, and it's really mostly a placeholder to prove that I came up with the idea first in case someone else tries to copy my idea.

However, I was reminded today of something from graduate school, and so I hearby invite you to join me as a member of the ASPCDSF: the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Salad Fixings.

Across the street in graduate school was a small lawyers office. One of these lawyers had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said, "Thou shalt not kill- go vegetarian."

If vegetables are not alive, then why are agriculture and plant physiology and similar majors considered part of Biology, the Life Science?

The lawyer probably saw himself as a crusader. I don't buy the premise. Lettuce is alive too, at least until I transfer it to the saline resistance chamber...