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Scientific Hoaxes and Bad Academic Writing
A new case of scientific hoax, that happened six years ago, is currently circulating: Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of…
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Mixing up Standard Errors and Standard Deviations
Over at the Non Significance blog, the author describes the case of a paper that has some strange descriptive statistics: What surprised me were the tiny standard deviations for some of the Variable 1 and 2, especially in combination with the range given. In the blog post, the author outlines his approach to make sense…
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Good Science – Bad Science? Panel Discussion at the University of Cologne
After I found out about the panel discussion on Good Scientific Practice at the University of Cologne via Twitter, I joined yesterday to watch the discussion as it was closely related to my thesis’ topic. The panel was filled with five professors and one junior professors from different faculties1, whose positions were related to “good…
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We have more than one Genome
Inspired by a recently published article in the ZEIT (in German only), I did some further reads on the topic of mosaicism. The bottom line: contrary to common belief and what is taught in text books (and University courses), the human body does not consist of cells with a single, personal genome, but instead each cell or…