“The benefit of published work is that if they have passed the muster of peer review future researchers can have faith in the results”, writes a commenter at The Economist . Such statements are commonplace. I couldn’t disagree more. Nothing is more fatal to the scientific endeavour than having “faith” in a previously published result — as the string of failed replications in oncology and in social psychology is showing.

Yesterday I asked whether anyone could identify this specimen: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8428 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8428” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/05/01/what-specimen-is-this/img_1030/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/img_1030.jpg” orig-size=“4000,3000” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"4","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

A quiz. What is this?

Predatory publishers are an increasingly prevalent problem. Jeffrey Beall’s list is getting a lot of coverage recently, including stories in Nature and in the New York Times . But the most recent and troubling predatory-publisher story I’ve read is about a lawsuit. No, not the Edwin Mellen Press libel suit.

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{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-7779 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7779” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/02/15/support-this-the-fair-access-to-science-and-technology-research-act-fastr/rexy-skeleton/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/rexy-skeleton.jpg” orig-size=“1976,1380” comments-opened=“1”

Generally when we present specimen photos in papers, we cut out the backgrounds so that only the bone is visible — as in this photo of dorsal vertebrae A and B of NHM R5937 “The Archbishop”, an as-yet indeterminate Tendaguru brachiosaur, in right lateral view: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8381 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8381”

A while back, I posted about a squirrel mandible that I’d acquired, and how ridiculously huge its incisor was.

It’s well worth reading this story about Thomas Herndon, a graduate student who as part of his training set out to replicate a well-known study in his field. The work he chose, Growth in a Time of Debt by Reinhart and Rogoff, claims to show that “median growth rates for countries with public debt over roughly 90 percent of GDP are about one percent lower than otherwise;

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I guess pretty much all researchers must suffer from Imposter Syndrome every now and then — the sense of not really belonging, not knowing enough, not getting enough done to justify our position.