English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

user116848

2:00 AM

I did. But you know he gave me a silent treatment.

user116848

:(

Oh for the love of Mike!

Got a FAQ/meta link to explain that policy in more detail? I had a look around but couldn't spot anything concrete, apart from some general controversy around the single-word-request tag. My general feeling is that the value of the answer is in identifying the specific word, and the "copypasted" stuff is just extra fluff that it would stand without. — Ganesh Sittampalam 27 mins ago

medica

@Arrowfar I'll tell you again, your question didn't make too much sense

user116848

@medica Okay thanks. You are nice though.

medica

@Arrowfar whelk

user116848

2:02 AM

Whelk?

user116848

Snail?

user116848

Oh, I see :)

Cerberus

@Mitch Hmm funny.

> Melian is also the only Ainu known to have had children in the "official" drafts of Tolkien's work, though there are some creatures who have reproduced, like Ungoliant, whose exact natures are unclear.

Also funny.

medica

@Arrowfar Silly answer from me. When my kids were really little, instead of saying "you're welcome", I'd say, "You're a whelk." (They did know what a whelk was.) I'm so used to saying it (we all say it now), it just slipped out. Sorry.

tchrist

Ok FMH.

They are all whining off the deep end, just as I predicted.

Cerberus

2:07 AM

> Theories about Ungoliant are very few. Some say that she was a fallen Maia (lesser divine spirit), or that she was bred from the darkness of the Void. Tolkien's original writings say that she was a primeval spirit of night, named Móru.

Mitch

The rainforests of Southeast Asia were defoliated by dropping thousands of tons of Ungoliant on them.

Cerberus

Whaaat?

tchrist

How dare I ask them to say something other than copypasta extravaganza? Where do I get off, like, you know, right?

@Cerberus √MOR darkness

Mitch

Shouldn't everybody on Iceland kind of know everybody by now?

Cerberus

@tchrist Naturally.

Mitch

2:08 AM

And what about their genetic diversity? Isn't everybody the first or second cousin of everybody there?

Cerberus

I myself consider the root sign in linguistics to be a silly conceit.

Present company excepted.

tchrist

@Mitch Don’t get me started on the children of Cain and Abel.

Mitch

What does the root sign mean in linguistics?

Cerberus

"Root".

tchrist

It means it is a primitive, reconstructed radical form.

Mitch

2:09 AM

@tchrist I think they left out a lot of details. But Iceland? That's totally an island.

medica

... still working on FMH. Help welcome.

no, I mean, explain

Mitch

@tchrist Oh. I thought'*' was used for that.

tchrist

@medica H = Harder

medica

FML, sure, FMH?

oh, ok...

thanks

Mitch

fetal maternal hemorrhage. duh.

tchrist

2:11 AM

I am seriously not sure what words you are talking about. Also, I don't know what and whose originality is in question. Do you mean I should add words to explain the usage and application of those two words? And please tell me what's the deal with this "nothing is original here?" — vickyace 22 mins ago

medica

haha

tchrist

I am seriously not sure what words you are talking about. Also, I don't know what and whose originality is in question. Do you mean I should add words to explain the usage and application of those two words? And please tell me what's the deal with this "nothing is original here?" — vickyace 23 mins ago

And everybody is upvoting the rimnods.

medica

his avatar is very creepy

tchrist

Isn’t it though?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist They probably cannot conceive of the fact that an answer should contain original words. They feel they are providing an answer and "correctness" is sufficient.

medica

2:12 AM

+4

Mitch

@medica Faculdade de Motricidade Humana. That's all I got.

tchrist

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 How then might they best be disabused of this nonsensical notion?

medica

@Mitch I saw that too!!!

@Mitch Frederick Memorial Hospital

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist I'm not really sure. But your comments may come across as rather brusque to them, given that they appear (again, to them) as coming from left-field.

Mitch

Why isn't google telling me the exact answer? Those sites are good at hiding it forcing you to click through to find... shocking tchrist, you're so salty!

@medica vicky is a dude?

medica

2:14 AM

Faculdade de Motricidade Humana... I'm not sure what it means, but I'm not checking in there.

@Mitch i dunno. Look at the avatar. would a woman do that?

Mitch

So does the unisex third person pronoun in mandarin have an underlying assumption of maleness to it, or is it truly a sexual?

Cerberus

Give me names that you have always liked.

Mitch

@medica It's the human faculty of motorcide. Pretty dark I think.

Cerberus

I give unto you Celebrimbor and Suppiluliuma.

Mitch

@medica I'm squinting and I can't tell what's going on. Male-ish shoulders but in the dark.

tchrist

2:17 AM

@BobRodes This is not a discussion forum; it is a question-and-answer site. Good answers are those composed mainly of one’s own words, supported by citations and references as needed. When there is nothing whatsoever but a copypasted dictionary definition, there is nothing original and therefore very little of value. — tchrist 16 secs ago

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch Yes, it does

@Mitch But it's complicated.

Mitch

@Cerberus I was going to say Alicia and Urgulanilla.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

There are Mandarin jokes where the punchline is that the speaker wasn't saying 他 but was rather saying 她.

tchrist

@Mitch Salacious, perhaps. Aun salado. But salty? I think not.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Those jokes would be nonsense if listeners didn't assume the male variant.

Cerberus

2:18 AM

@Mitch Ah, tell me the stories of those names.

Mitch

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 but that's cheating, it's a writing pun.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

However, lots of Chinese speakers have trouble when speaking English, sometimes saying he instead of she or vice versa, which is evidence that they aren't coding for the gender of the other person

tchrist

I give up. SWRs are complete trash.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch No, the point is that both are pronounced "ta". ta went to the store and bought some shoes. Is ta male or female? The joke assumes the listener infers male, but the reveal at the end is that ta was female.

Mitch

Alicia is an old Etruscan name. Wait, isn't Urgu... really an an old Etruscan name, Hercules < Heracles < ... um ... < something Etruscan?

tchrist

2:20 AM

And any attempt at reforming the medium is met with umbrage at best and rabidity most commonly.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Until about 100 years ago there was only 他 and it was used for all: male, female, neuter, animals, gods. Now each one of those has its own character.

Cerberus

@tchrist: I'm sorry, but I don't think this is fair. One of the functions of the site is to put information up where people can more easily find it, because it is directly linked to a question. In the case of answers to SWRs, I think there often isn't much to be added to a dictionary definition—our function is to make it easier for people to find it. — Cerberus 13 secs ago

tchrist

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Well that’s good: who needs NPCs?

Cerberus

@tchrist They kind of are. The problem is with them, not with the answers.

@Mitch Urgu- sounds very Etruscan indeed!

tchrist

Oh I get it. I mean I get what you mean. But in my initial days as a new member, I was told to keep definitions and other matter as concise and laconic as possible. And I obeyed what I was told since day one. But I get your point. An answer should also contain a proper explanation, besides the actual answer. Did I get you right? — vickyace 2 mins ago

Mitch

2:22 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Like the doctor riddle? "A doctor sees a patient in the emergency room, the patient is a boy who was just in a car accident where the dad died. The doctor says "I can't do the surgery, the boy is my son" " How can that be????

tchrist

Answers with no original text do not add value to the site.

Cerberus

@Mitch Is Alicia really Etruscan?

Mitch

@Cerberus I know right!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch Yes, exactly

Mitch

@Cerberus I have no idea. But it sounds good doesn't it? goes off to research

tchrist

2:25 AM

This is an answer:

2

A: What do you call money earned through unethical sources?

In addition to loot and booty, which are limited, and dirty money, which is quite general, I would offer up the more specific blood money. Loot and booty are more specifically for theft or ransacking of a national treasure, such as a tomb filled with gold. Dirty money is quite general and can be...

This is not an answer:

22

A: What do you call money earned through unethical sources?

It is often called: dirty money: Profit from the sale of narcotics, prostitution, guns, or other illegal activities. Money that needs to be laundered. money obtained illegally. Source:http://www.thefreedictionary.com

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Language-log article about how in writing, the use of 他/她 is a problem and some writers are just writing TA

Cerberus

@Mitch Alicia is Germanic.

From Adelheid.

tchrist

@Cerberus Alice is English; Alicia, Spanish.

Cerberus

It's Germanic.

tchrist

Adelweiss is something else.

Cerberus

2:27 AM

Adelweiss I do not know, must be some other word.

tchrist

Be that as it may.

joculosity

Mitch

"A Latinization of Alice, which is in turn from the Germanic Adalheidis"

tchrist

Heidi!

Hiya Heidi!

Where ya been Haydn all me life?

Mitch

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I like the bilingual pun 'wo men = us'

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch yeah it's great

Here is a Sino-platonic paper re: cover sexism in the Chinese language. I haven't finished looking it over but it may be the paper I am trying to find, which explains the hidden sexism of ta. Spoiler alert: Chinese, like many lanauages, has built-in sexism.

Mitch

2:33 AM

BUt that link hasn't come up yet (from chinadaily) Is Mair saying that they write 'TA' or is he suggesting that they use that instead of what they write now?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 No!!!!!!

Cerberus

@medica The Pope is also worried about "intellectual property":

> The Pope talks about how economic development, prosperity and economic growth has helped lift many out of poverty and built up nations and created tremendous opportunities for people. However, he is worried about "malfunctions and dramatic problems" in the system. Such as? Well, intellectual property for one thing:

"On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care"

tchrist

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 So you’re saying Chinese is a manly language, right, not some girly language like Japanese? :)

@Cerberus Papa Paco is going to make a closet-Catholic out of you yet.

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Which makes it as harmless as other symbols out of context, which aren't actual things or actions.

@tchrist This was five years ago.

tchrist

@Cerberus Wrong pope. Very wrong pope.

Cerberus

Yes.

But I thought perhaps Medica might acknowledge his authority. Sharing the results of increasing knowledge and research is important, and copyrights and patents inhibit this.

His Infallibility said so.

tchrist

2:37 AM

Was he sitting down?

I think he has to be speaking ex cathedra for that to work.

He has this special God-chair, see, and anything spoken from it is by definition correct.

Cerberus

Naturally.

tchrist

The Holy God-Chair See.

Cerberus

It's not the one with the hole, though.

Mitch

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇家人不希望TA“高调”“惹事” So yes, just romanized 'TA' but presumabably the newspaper is for chinese readers that know western characters, not western readers.

@tchrist the japanese have a separate japanese-girl language to take care of that.

@tchrist I thought they dropped the infallibility thing, at least officially.

tchrist

@Mitch shhh

Mitch

2:43 AM

Or the church said they're not going to claim it any more.

oops. I spoke too loudly.

tchrist

@Mitch I thought that that had died out.

www3.nd.edu/~ujournal/assets/files/05-06/japanese.pdf

> Japanese Women’s Language (JWL) is thought to be a clearly defined subset of the Japanese language as a whole. Women’s language (joseego) is held up as the ideal form of female communication, as men’s language (danseego) is for males. Traditionally, these are the proper ways for members of the respective genders to speak, and they are set as opposites to one another, as mutually exclusive binary distinctions.

> In English, too, women are said to express themselves linguistically differently from men in a way that allows for subordination. According to Lakoff,4 women supposedly use tag questions, hedges, empty adjectives, hypercorrect grammatical forms,5 intensifiers,6 and other speech forms, creating an image of uncertainty, irrationality, and insecurity, which makes possible the continued subordination of women.

Eek.

One of those.

> Though some support it, JWL appears to be lessening in popularity, especially with younger Japanese women, and so the next section takes up the question of who actually does use it and why they might do so.

Mitch

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 ha ha, sino_platonic_ I don't know what that's supposed to mean!

tchrist

> Because linguistic practice often strays from linguistic ideology, it is useful to examine who in reality does employ JWL and who does not, or utilizes it in a manner inconsistent with prescribed usage. As Okamoto and Smith explain, “‘deviant’ uses [of linguistic forms] are meaningful choices rather than mere exceptions or anomalies.”57
Therefore, insight may be gained by focusing on the social groups that employ JWL differently. Specifically, I will be considering the speech of women who live in Ibaraki, schoolgirls, proponents of women’s liberation, and homosexual men.

Mitch

But yes, it looks like that paper is half about the inherent sexism in the sexless 'ta', and the other half is about how inherently sexist 'ren' is.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch There was a women's language in China too.

@Cerberus I'm not interested in your opinion about whether sexism is harmful or not.

Mitch

2:52 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I think all women have a language that men can't hear. They talk about their periods and stuff.

tchrist

“Liminal identity”?

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You're inflating the term, is what I meant. Thereby doing an injustice to women who are actually treated badly.

Mitch

@tchrist oh yeah. the women talk about their liminals too.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch I don't know much about the Chinese women's language, but I seem to recall that it had its own writing system, because women needed ways to communicate in writing but were systemically denied literacy.

tchrist

> An additional sector of Japanese society that does not employ the prescribed features of JWL is that of schoolgirls. This is a rather recent development as commentators in the 1990s increasingly began to notice.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:54 AM

@Cerberus You do not understand what you are talking about.

tchrist

> Proponents of women’s liberation also strike out against prescribed JWL because they reject the feminine image that is inextricably connected to it. It may be seen that not only “feminists” but also modern women in general view JWL as an outdated form of communication, and they think they sound “too feminine” if they use it.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Nüshu script

Nüshu (), is a syllabic script, a simplification of Chinese characters that was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China. Language The Nüshu script is used to write a local dialect of Chinese known as Xiangnan Tuhua (湘南土話, 'Southern Hunanese Tuhua') that is spoken by the people of the Xiao and Yongming River region of northern Jiangyong County, Hunan. This dialect, which differs enough from the other parts of Hunan that it is unintelligible to speakers of that dialect, is known to its speakers as "Dong language", and it is only written in th...

tchrist

> One of the groups which actually does employ a form of JWL is not comprised of women but of men. This style of speaking is called onee kotoba (older sister speech), and it is used by certain members of the homosexual male community. Not all gay men use it, and often those who do are scorned by those who do not.

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 smiles

tchrist

Gee, like that never happens in English, right!

Cerberus

2:55 AM

Fabulous.

tchrist

Zhuzh.

Cerberus

Dahling.

tchrist

I just want to slap people sometimes.

Those times, in fact.

KitFox

WTF? It's the middle of the night.

tchrist

It’s Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody. . . .

KitFox

2:59 AM

My husband is out of town, and I thought it would be a great time to watch The Walking Dead, on account of he doesn't like horror.

Turns out, I don't like horror.

tchrist

Ah.

Mitch

@KitFox horror is gross

tchrist

Well, you’re in fine company then.

KitFox

Except now I can't sleep.

Mitch

watch comedy then

tchrist

3:00 AM

Can’t or daren’t?

Mitch

it will remove the bad images.

tchrist

pr0n

KitFox

I am having a virtual ride in a car at night in the rain.

tchrist

Scary!

KitFox

And I already tried porn, but then people kept turning into gross half-eaten corpses.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:01 AM

You could read the sino-platonic paper about sexism in Chinese

Mitch

No!!!!!!

KitFox

I coulsnxxx.

So I wander in here, and here is a discussion about sexism amongst people who ought to be sleeping.

I was hoping for something more fun.

Mitch

discussion about sexism among people who should be awake?

tchrist

Don’t we have one of these already?

0

Q: One word for either Income (credit) or Expense (debit)

What word would be the best to denote a money transaction - either debit or credit?

thesaurus

@KitFox This is what you get for watching horror films on shrooms, you know.

KitFox

Tagged with thesaurus?

tchrist

3:03 AM

Quaint, eh?

KitFox

Well, there was some zombie porn I watched one time, and it was actually pretty good.

medica

@Mitch sinewy arms, not quite human (CG?) and fuzziness (hair?) looks homolupine to me.

Mitch

but 'vicky'?

tchrist

@KitFox Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?

@Mitch Probably a flying ace from Vichy France.

medica

@Cerberus not fair. First, I don't believe popes actually are the voice of God or reason; second, medical research is as open as anything I know. One has only to read the literature.

tchrist

3:06 AM

@medica Medical, maybe. Pharmaceutical, well.

medica

@Mitch I know, but from where? I can't figure it out.

tchrist

I was merely the paperboy.

KitFox

@tchrist I do not understand.

tchrist

@KitFox “My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?”

medica

@tchrist many foreign countries have much cheaper meds (same meds) than we do. But point taken.

tchrist

3:07 AM

In other words, I was creeped out severely and fear for my dreams.

KitFox

Because of my zombie porn?

tchrist

I shall have to read some children’s tale before I sleep. And not Hansel and Gretal, either.

Mitch

Bambi? Nope.

The Giving Tree? Nope

tchrist

@KitFox I sometimes have a distressingly vivid visual imagination.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist The Paperbag Princess

Mitch

3:09 AM

Where the wild things are? That always gave me the creeps but it ends up well.

tchrist

Into the Woods

Mitch

babes in toyland?

sweeney todd?

medica

winnie the pooh

KitFox

@tchrist Oh, well, this was just two guys, one with white contact lenses and some powder makeup, doing a woman made up to look up a high school girl and she had a filthy mouth on her.

tchrist

Pooh!!!

5

Q: Is there a hypernym for debit/credit?

I’m looking for a generic word that means “debit or credit”. Say I have a transaction, and I don’t know whether it’s a debit on the account or a credit on the account, and I want to ask about it, is there a word I can use? For example, if I were asking whether a book were green or blue, I woul...

single-word-requests hypernyms finance

KitFox

3:10 AM

So no need to be alarmed.

I could share the cake erotica if that would help.

tchrist

Cake is good.

Let them eat cake between courses.

0

Q: Check if here is any grammatical mistakes

The Palestinians deserve for us to be silent. Is the grammar correct? It is basically the same as saying they deserves our silence?

grammar

Cerberus

@medica But you cannot use the results of the literature. Further, even much of the research itself is secret, although Europe is in the process of legislating against that.

tchrist

We get such fine questions on Saturday night, too.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@KitFox I think there was a movie or tv show about a human who fell in love with a zombie

tchrist

@medica The problem is that research results are skewed because people don’t publish negative results.

medica

3:13 AM

@Cerberus I just don't see it... no pun intended

tchrist

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Juana la Loca, Queen of Castilla

medica

@tchrist there are bigger problems in research than that...

tchrist

@medica Sure.

Did you see all those massive retractions this week?!

Mitch

@medica what are they

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica Well, publication bias is one of the biggest problems, IMO.

medica

3:14 AM

remember "Dr. Andrew Wakefield?"

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

It affects every scientific field

KitFox

Let's not forget the large number of studies that are incredibly poorly designed.

medica

cheating, falsifying results, bribe-taking

tchrist

0

Q: What's is the meaning of the phrase "Read it like you've written it"?

Does the meaning of the phrase changes on its usage? If it changes, how?

meaning phrases expressions phrase-usage

medica

that's just the beginning

Cerberus

3:15 AM

@medica Research is carried out. The result is knowledge about a medicine. You cannot produce the medicine.

medica

labs claiming breakthroughs to beat other labs working on the same problems,

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica I think some of those problems would go away if the publication industry published more articles that failed to find things, or failed to replicate results, or simply replicated results.

Cerberus

@medica Data from clinical trials is classified as a "trade secret" and kept secret.

tchrist

Science Journal Pulls 60 Papers in Peer-Review Fraud

Mitch

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 ther are journals that accept papers like that. but they are not particularly highly valued

medica

3:16 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 All results are supposed to be replicated before they are submitted.

@Mitch right

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That would be nice. But those people do not get cited enough, nor do they get enough funding.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica What? replicated by whom?

medica

@tchrist exactly

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus That is my point.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 the researchers who did the study

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:17 AM

@medica So, you do a study, then replicate it yourself? what good would that be?

medica

they are supposed to do the research, then confirm

tchrist

Nature retracts controversial stem cell papers

medica

so that everyone can replicate it and get the same results

if they couldn't trust that that had been done, how could you trust any research?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica I'm not sure you necessarily have to do everything twice to show trustworthy research.

Or rather, experiments are supposed to already include enough repetition to account for chance

medica

There used to be a joke among us (researchers, when I was one) about publishing in the Journal of Irreproduceable Results

KitFox

3:19 AM

We never did. You just have to do it right the first time.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Large samples, and all that

KitFox

Yeah. that.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I disagree. It's standard.

KitFox

It wasn't in my domain.

medica

@KitFox I totally disagree with that!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:20 AM

@medica I've never heard of it.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You've done research?

@KitFox What kind of research have you done?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica No, but I've been reading about the problems of scientific research. And "researchers aren't doing their whole experiment twice" has never been mentioned once by anyone voicing concerns.

medica

Just asking.

KitFox

behavioral, pharma, and neuro.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 it's taken for granted!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:22 AM

@medica I'm not sure we're on the same page here.

medica

@KitFox I don't know where you're coming from, saying do it right the first time. That's ridiculous. The first time is a trial.

KitFox

I did non-human animal research though. Maybe that's the difference.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 tell me what you are saying, maybe I'm not understanding correctly.

@KitFox no difference.

Good research is good research. Lousy research is trash.

KitFox

Must be a difference, because your reported experience diverges from mine.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Let's say I have a new brick that I designed to be 100x stronger than regular bricks. My experiment would be to smash a large enough number of regular bricks and super-strong bricks, such that at the end I've built a strong enough case that my new bricks withstand 100x more force, 95% of the time or more.

medica

3:23 AM

@KitFox Vastly.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

or whatever p value I use

If I smash just one brick, that doesn't prove anything. But if I smash 10? 100? 1000? at some point it's convincing.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 bricks aren't biological systems.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I don't need to then go and smash ANOTHER 100 or 1000 bricks.

I already did the experiment enough times, so to speak.

medica

tires, etc, correct

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica That isn't really relevant

KitFox

3:24 AM

Right. The power of the study is built into the design.

And if when you analyze your results, you need more power, then you add more.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

If I give one person a pill and they get better, it could be placebo effect or spontaneous remission or the pill worked or whatever. So I need to try it on lots of people.

KitFox

Or you re-design and start again.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 but claim that (yes, it is) something is happening in a biological system, which you've shown through steps a through h, you had better do it so many times that it is reproducible in any lab with the right equipment.

I think we are saying something similar but aren't understanding it the same way.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica Yes but that's not what I mean when I talk about publishing reproductions of experiments. Of course the original study has to perform multiple trials of the experiment. You can't flip the coin once and then claim that it always comes up tails.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It's not quite that simple...

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I'm pretty sure we are saying the same thing, because that's what I mean when I'm talking of reproducible results.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:29 AM

@medica I'm talking about independent people reproducing the results.

You: I flipped a coin and it always comes up heads. parameters: 1 coin, 10 flips.
Me: I flipped a coin and it came up tails 50% of the time. 1 coin, 100000 flips. Your results are not reproducible.

KitFox

You didn't follow my protocol in your coin preparation.

Cerberus

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yeah. The whole quantitative approach was doomed from the beginning.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

If there were greater publication incentives for reproductions or non-reproductions of earlier papers, then there would be more incentive to do those experiements (over) and there would be less incentive to cheat on your original study (because you might get caught)

KitFox

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Well, to be fair, studies often partially replicate the studies that they build on.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@KitFox I knew you'd say that. In response I have prepared a banana cream pie which I now throw at you. throws pie

KitFox

3:31 AM

ducks

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

curses! foiled again

KitFox

looks sadly at pie dripping off headboard

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 that's a problem with research. It should be reproduced by an independent group before it's believed. But because of funding, that's not practical. The only people with that kind of funding are the drug companies. So we rely on the original researchers on reproducing their results before publishing their work (or rather the journal should require it before accepting for publication). Which is why lousy research doesn't make it into PNAS

KitFox

If I had let you hit me with that, I could be enjoying it right now.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@KitFox I'll be honest, I cut a lot of corners making that pie.

KitFox

3:32 AM

Oh.

Cerberus

The Fifth Surveillance: Corporate Spying On Non-Profits

> Love says that PhRMA and some companies in the copyright sector funded efforts to investigate the sources of funding for NGOs working on intellectual property issues, and to press those foundations to end their support of consumer advocacy.
...
One of the troubling aspects of recent corporate espionage against nonprofits is the use of current and former police, current government contractors, and former CIA, NSA, FBI, military, Secret Service and other law enforcement officers.

KitFox

I once romanced a junior editor of PNAS.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica Well... you mean you rely on researchers devising studies properly... not replicating the entire study twice.

KitFox

I feel like I have tingles in my eyes tonight. As well as my scalp and ears.

medica

i think it's somewhere between the two.

You get the results you're looking for. Great. Now, do it again to be sure.

Cerberus

3:36 AM

Big pharma using CIA agents to spy on patent/copyright reformers to try and pressure organisations into stopping funding them.

medica

That's how it was approached when I was doing research. Once was simply not acceptable.

tchrist

I am so cracking up.

3

A: What's a good replacement to "cookbook" as referring to general-purpose manual-like computer books?

O'Reilly, being a book publisher, Tom Christiansen, being an author and a regular EL&U contributor, knows English well. There's a reason why they chose to call them "cookbooks" rather than the other terms suggested here so far. The goal of the series is to provide short snippets of computer cod...

KitFox

About the CIA agents? Me too.

Oh.

tchrist

Oh, they lost the formatting.

It is, however, true.

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica I think a proper experiment always includes enough trials to demonstrate that the results didn't occur due to chance. But that isn't what I understand when I hear people talking about problems with replicating experiments. It's independent replication that is the issue, or rather, the drastic lack of it, and the unwillingness of journals to actually publish studies that "merely" confirm or refute previous studies.

tchrist

3:38 AM

And Randy has finally come in so now I can retire to bed with both kitties and kiddy book.

medica

Agreed: that's a problem with research. It should be reproduced by an independent group before it's believed. But because of funding, that's not practical. The only people with that kind of funding are the drug companies. So we rely on the original researchers reproducing their results before publishing their work (or rather the journal should require it before accepting for publication). Which is why lousy research doesn't make it into PNAS

@tchrist Yay!

Night all.

Good night.

Night!

3:40 AM

So let me iterate that most studies at least partially replicate the studies that they are built on.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica That's what you just wrote?

medica

they should, assiduously.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 yes, before

why?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I guess I'm curious why you felt it needed repeating.

medica

I think we're saying the same thing

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I think so? sorta? Except not exactly. To me, "researchers reproducing their results" implies doing the whole experiment over. If you did 100 trials the first time, you do 100 trials the second time. The "results" is the aggregate data + conclusion of the first 100 trials.

KitFox

3:44 AM

I've never known of or heard of a researcher doing such a thing.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica I think what you mean is that we rely on the researcher doing enough trials to prove that the conclusion didn't arise due to chance.

medica

thinking

Thinking back to my research

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Maybe we are just using different words for this?

medica

maybe

that's partly true, to be sure.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

In which case the journal should be able to tell by reading the paper whether or not there are enough trials to support the conclusion.

But I remember reading a few months back that of the top, I dunno, 100 most cited cancer studies, an independent researcher wasn't able to replicate any of them.

medica

3:47 AM

I think you're correct. Only I might say, you're damn sure it is correct and reproducible with 100% probability.

KitFox

It's pretty surprising how many crappy studies get published.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That is horrendous.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@KitFox The incentives are all wrong.

KitFox

I remember being floored by the poor design of pretty much every study I read in NEJM.

So much so, I stopped even reading them, much less citing them.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Good journals are able to not only judge this, but if in doubt, to call on another lab to reproduce the study before publishing.

@KitFox NEJM isn't a research journal. PNAS is.

KitFox

3:49 AM

Not really, it isn't.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica Yeah but how often do they do that?

The Replicability Crisis in Cancer Research

KitFox

The Proceedings is more like a meta journal.

A lot of summaries.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 In my day, it wasn't unheard of; you either submitted to those conditions or you didn't get published in the top journals.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

> The cancer researchers Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis made a rather remarkable claim last year. In a commentary that analyzed the dearth of efficacious novel cancer therapies, they revealed that scientists at the biotechnology company Amgen were unable to replicate the vast majority of published pre-clinical research studies. Only 6 out of 53 landmark cancer studies could be replicated, a dismal success rate of 11%!
The Amgen researchers had deliberately chosen highly innovative cancer research papers, hoping that these would form the scientific basis for future cancer therapies that they cou…

medica

@KitFox Maybe now. Not when I was reading it.

KitFox

3:51 AM

More than fifteen years ago?

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Ugh. Remember I said bribes and falsification were a big problem?

@KitFox definately! lol! I've been a doc for... almost 40 years

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica Right. But my notion is that better controls in publishing would solve that, by shifting the incentives.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I agree. The journal is irresponsible that publishes bad studies.

KitFox

I find it hard to believe that bribes are an issue.

medica

@KitFox Wait, that's not right, I miscounted. 30 years. duh

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:54 AM

Right now people gain prestige and influence and money through publication, especially if the paper is ground-breaking. But raise the stakes: incentivize fact-checking and replication and refutation more, and cheaters will get caught, and people who are good at lab work but not great at innovation will have work to do, diminishing their need for cheating.

medica

@KitFox Andrew Wakefield? Remember him? Bribed. totally.

KitFox

Cheaters get caught.

@medica OK, so there's one.

medica

only eventually

they're legion!

KitFox

Well, maybe amongst the medical researchers.

medica

depends on who's doing the bribing and what for...

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:56 AM

@KitFox They are, but aren't the biggest problem, to my knowledge. There are other problems: collusion (like that peer-review-ring that was recently busted). Bad studies that aren't getting the review they need. Journals publishing only "interesting" stuff and leaving out "boring" things like replications or non-replications or studies that showed that such-and-such didn't work.

Journals not requiring pre-registration of studies, so that big companies can do 20 studies in parallel, and cherry pick the results they need.

medica

medical research isn't the same as medical researchers

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica Wakefield himself was corrupt, but not the journal, right?

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 correct

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@medica So his result probably would've been published anyway. But there is no incentive for someone else to come along and replicate his results.

How long did it take for someone to try?

medica

the journal revoked the publication and publicized the irreproducibility when the first studies contradicting wakefield started to come in.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:58 AM

In any case, Wakefield's kinda a bad example. The scientific community has thrown him out years ago.

KitFox

Look, I don't think you are thinking about the implications of what I said when I said that studies very frequently at least partially replicate prior studies.

medica

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 it started almost immediately

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Wakefield is a problem because people still believe him, not because of problems in publication.

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