11 Feb 2012
Peter Theil gives his take on science funding/peer review:
My libertarian views are qualified because I do think things worked better in the 1950s and 60s, but it’s an interesting question as to what went wrong with DARPA. It’s not like it has been defunded, so why has DARPA been doing so much less for the economy than it did forty or fifty years ago? Parts of it have become politicized. You can’t just write checks to the thirty smartest scientists in the United States. Instead there are bureaucratic processes, and I think the politicization of science—where a lot of scientists have to write grant applications, be subject to peer review, and have to get all these people to buy in—all this has been toxic, because the skills that make a great scientist and the skills that make a great politician are radically different. There are very few people who are both great scientists and great politicians. So a conservative account of what happened with science in the 20thcentury is that we had a decentralized, non-governmental approach all the way through the 1930s and early 1940s. At that point, the government could accelerate and push things tremendously, but only at the price of politicizing it over a series of decades. Today we have a hundred times more scientists than we did in 1920, but their productivity per capita is less that it used to be.
Thiel has a history of making controversial comments, and I don’t always agree with him, but I think that his point about the politicization of the grant process is interesting.
11 Feb 2012
Nate Silver makes a table of all NBA players that have had four games in a row with 20+ points, 6+ assists, 50%+ shooting. The list is short (and it doesn’t include Kobe).
10 Feb 2012
This Sunday February 12, the news magazine 60 Minutes will have a feature on the Duke Clinical Trials saga. Will Dr. Potti himself make an appearance? This is from the 60 Minutes web site:
Deception at Duke - Scott Pelley reports on a Duke University oncologist whose supervisor says he manipulated the data in his study of a breakthrough cancer therapy. Kyra Darnton is the producer.
The word on the street is that the segment will also feature statisticians Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
And that makes two posts this week about people at M.D. Anderson. What’s going on here?
09 Feb 2012
In a previous post I complained about statistics journals taking way too long rejecting papers. Today I am complaining because even when everything goes right —better than above average review time (for statistics), useful and insightful comments from reviewers— we can come out losing.
In May 2011 we submitted a paper on removing GC bias from RNAseq data to Biostatistics. It was published on December 27. However, we were scooped by this BMC Bioinformatics paper published ten days earlier despite being submitted three months later and accepted 11 days after ours. The competing paper has already earned the “highly accessed” distinction. The two papers, both statistics papers, are very similar, yet I am afraid more people will read the one that was finished second but published first.
Note that Biostatistics is one of the fastest stat journals out there. I don’t blame the journal at all here. We statisticians have to change our culture when it comes to reviews.
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