Bird to watch for. We hoped new sightings would prove that the ivory-billed woodpecker is alive and pecking. But indirect evidence from trees in Florida failed to sway the skeptics, and the original Arkansas sightings of the bird are looking increasingly shaky. Maybe it drowned in a rogue gravitational wave.
CREDIT: TERRY SMITH
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
"increasingly shaky"
Some of you may not have seen this paragraph from Science (12/22/06):
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7 comments:
Bravo! Excellent snark from Science.
That Terry Smith fellow must be reading this blog.
"Bravo! Excellent snark from Science"
I would have preferred a serious retraction as the cover article
Maybe it drowned in a rogue gravitational wave.
...as Fitzcrow desperately clings to the floating piece of junk that is the Luneau video.
I would have preferred a serious retraction as the cover article
No, a snark is definitely called for. A retraction at this stage would kill all the fun.
And this, just a little further down is a bit ironic:
Science 22 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5807, p. 1853
DOI: 10.1126/science.314.5807.1853
BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR:
Breakdown of the Year: Scientific Fraud
Jennifer Couzin
The Woo Suk Hwang stem cell debacle marked the beginning of a bad year for honest science. Incidents of publication fraud, if not on the rise, are garnering more attention, and the review process is under scrutiny. ... (Read more)
Well actually Science Magazine did retract, they just did it ina quiet and gentlemanly way. Don Kennedy in his editorial calls it the "worst miss of the year" and mainly because the press didn't get at the details of how Science handled this paper (the book review editor oversaw the peer review) - it wasn't linked to the Hwang incident that forced science to re-examine the way it handles papers as journalism not science.
The Cornell team used Science as part of a PR campaign - not as a scientific process of increasing knowledge.
The critical comment is in Kennedy's editorial here
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;314/5807/1841
"actually Science Magazine did retract"
Not really. Only if you read between the lines and give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt, which we am unwilling to do at this point.
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