Thursday, December 5, 2013

Thursday--waiting for the freeze. Science, reproducibility, and reliability.

The southern weather system is passing well to the south of us but the one hitting the northern plains and upper midwest is due in over the weekend.  By this time next week we expect high temps in the teens.  Oh, well--it is December.  I got three seed catalogs in the mail this week so I can look through them and dream about the spring.

I found this blog post on Scientific American this morning.  I find it interesting because I spent quite a while (many, many years) trying to reproduce an experimental program and its results but was totally unable to do so.  I had to spend several months formulating my own procedures to examine the same phenomenon.  Why exactly I couldn't reproduce the original research I have no idea.  But we place such reliance on so-called scientific "results" without questioning how those results were obtained or how trustworthy either the results or the researchers are.

Sometime last month I read a couple of stories which indicated a collapse of the sardine fisheries off the West Coast.  I read one this morning that the Atlantic States Marine fisheries Commission has cancelled the northern shrimp fishing season of 2014 because that population has declined precipitously.  That is a bit technical so you might prefer to read this article at Think Progress.




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