This article is an interview of a neuro-science researcher. It describes how synapses are controlled, but more than that, comments on grants, the influence of journals, and the inappropriate directions research may be forced to travel are covered. I may be an old fart, but the old ways I remember were much more to the point of an independent approach to progress. Down with peer review!

http://the-scientist.com/2011/12/01/critical-connections/

Heh.

My old psych prof flatly stated that because of ethics boards, no major advance has happened in human psychology since the 1960's.

This quote from the article is the key: (my italics)

'Science is driven by two powerful motivations—to discover the “truth,” while acknowledging how fleeting it can be, and to achieve recognition through publication in prominent journals, through grant support to continue and expand research, and through promotion, prizes and memberships in prestigious scientific societies. The search for scientific truth may be seriously derailed by the desire for recognition, which may result in scientific misconduct.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the main sources of research funds in the United States, have defined scientific misconduct in research as involving fabrication, falsification or plagiarism. “Fabrication” is making up data; “falsification” is altering or selecting data. This definition of misconduct has been adopted by other federal agencies and most scientific societies and research institutions. Explicitly excluded from the category of scientific misconduct are “honest error or differences of opinion”; other types of misconduct, such as sexual harassment, animal abuse and misuse of grant funds, are targeted by other prevention and enforcement mechanisms.'

http://www.thenation.com/article/165313/disgrace-marc-hauser?page=full

This illustrates the state of government funded science today.

"Normally these days I prefer to only deal with scientific papers, which of course leaves activist pleadings like Hansen’s stuff off the list. But in this case I’ll make an exception. Here’s my sole reason for bringing this up. Hansen’s paper says the following (emphasis mine):

The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).

I bring it up because it is climate science at its finest. Since the observations were not of the expected range, rather than figure out why the results might be wrong, they just twisted the dials to “reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models.”

And curiously, the “imbalance suggested by climate models”, of some 0.85 W/m2, was actually from Hansen’s previous paper. That earlier paper of his, by coincidence called “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications“, gave that 0.85 W/m2 figure as a result from Hansen’s own GISS climate model … but all this incestuous back-slapping is probably just another coincidence.

Of course, you know what all this means. Soon, the modelers will be claiming that the CERES satellite results verify that the GISS and other climate models are accurately duplicating observations …

You can see why Hansen’s “science” gets left off my list of things to read.

w.

PS—Upon further research I find that according to Loeb et al., 2009, they didn’t just tweak the dials on the CERES observations to get the answer they wanted, as I had foolishly stated above.

No, they didn’t do that at all. Instead, they used…

an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust SW and LW TOA fluxes within their range of uncertainty to remove the inconsistency between average global net TOA flux and heat storage in the earth–atmosphere system.

I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that it wasn’t just twisting dials, they actually used an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust their Procrustean Bed …"

http://the-scientist.com/2011/12/01/critical-connections/