You Will Anyway: University Research

Sunday, January 17, 2016

University Research

At the risk of overdoing it, I'm back on my soapbox about tainted University research.

Academic press offices are known to overhype their own research. But the University of Maryland recently took this to appalling new heights — trumpeting an incredibly shoddy study on chocolate milk and concussions that happened to benefit a corporate partner.

It's a cautionary tale of just how badly science can go awryas universities increasingly partner with corporations to conduct research.

[...]

The University of Maryland is not unique here. There's been a push to commercialize university research, and it's happening across North America.

Vox

And they've been doing it for many decades. Although I must admit, this may be the shoddiest, least "scientific" study I've ever heard of coming out of a university.

Worse, the scientists didn't even bother to publish their results before publicizing them, according to an excellent probe of the release by the health news watchdog Health News Review.

How could they? They wouldn't have ever gotten past the reviewers.

At the University of Maryland, the vice president of research has stepped in to do an institutional review about the chocolate milk study. The university press office told me that publicizing results of still-unpublished research is "not customary."

I'm willing to bet this "study" never got published - at least not in a scientific journal, where studies are purportedly aimed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.