Peer-review

[Deep Sea Isopod]

Is there such things as Professional and Scholarly peer-review, and is there a difference?

[Deep Sea Isopod]

Any takers? I thought this would be an easy one.

I need to respond to a fence-sitter, but I know there's a couple of IDiots and Creotards watching.

[GenesForLife]

Professional peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. Professional peer review activity is widespread in the field of health care, where it may be termed "clinical peer review" or "medical peer review". Further, since peer review activity is commonly segmented by clinical discipline, there is also physician peer review, nursing peer review, dentistry peer review,[10] etc. Many other professional fields have some level of peer review process: accounting,[11] law,[12][13] engineering (e.g., software peer review, technical peer review), aviation, and even forest fire management.[14] In academia, peer review is common in decisions related to faculty advancement and tenure. Peer review is used in education to achieve certain learning objectives, particularly as a tool to reach higher order processes in the affective and cognitive domains as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy. This may take a variety of forms, including closely mimicking the scholarly peer review processes used in science and medicine.[15]


Scholarly peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish; and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Although generally considered essential to academic quality, and used in most important scientific publications, peer review has been criticized as ineffective, slow, and misunderstood (see anonymous peer review and open peer review). Recently there have been some experiments with wiki-style, signed, peer reviews, for example in an issue of the Shakespeare Quarterly.[16]

Pragmatically, peer review refers to the work done during the screening of submitted manuscripts and funding applications. This process encourages authors to meet the accepted standards of their discipline and prevents the dissemination of irrelevant findings, unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal views. Publications that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review

[GenesForLife]

Some of the best journals use double blinded peer review.

[Deep Sea Isopod]

Thanks, GFL.

[Deep Sea Isopod]

How does one respond to this?

The assertion that Science has all the answers to every important question, and that no answers are to be found in any ”unscientific” source, is arrogant in the extreme. This assertion is offensive to anyone who has studied the history of science, for that history is littered with once-fashioable theories that have been discarded as not merely false, but dangerous. It is not hyperbole to say that the infamous dictators of the 20th century — Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot — all believed their tyrranies were justified by Science. Nor is it irrelevant to point out that all of these murderous madmen shared a contempt for religion and traditional morality.

So I wrote this...

The assertion that Science has all the answers to every important question, and that no answers are to be found in any �unscientific� source, is arrogant in the extreme.

And science doesn't claim to have all the answers. If it did, then we would no longer need scientists.
But I am interested in why I should trust science over any "unscientific source"
And why, where there are gaps in the science, should I not rush to place any unscientific theories into the gaps.

This assertion is offensive to anyone who has studied the history of science, for that history is littered with once-fashioable theories that have been discarded as not merely false, but dangerous.

Which is why the Scientific Method was developed. And as for those theories which have later been found to be false,isn't it science itself that falsified them?

It is not hyperbole to say that the infamous dictators of the 20th century � Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot � all believed their tyrranies were justified by Science. Nor is it irrelevant to point out that all of these murderous madmen shared a contempt for religion and traditional morality.

I can list some leaders who used religion to justify their tyranny. This doesn't falsify religion.
Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Saddam all had moustaches. Does that mean all Mousached people are dangerous?
Just because madmen abuse science to kill or control people, doesn't make it false.
We still see it happening today. Roadside bombs being triggered with a mobile phone. Jumbo jets being flown into buildings.
Mobile phones and aeroplanes are very real.

I'd like to point out that Hitler was brought up a Roman Catholic, and believed in a creator god. He opposed Darwinian theory, but he did dabble in eugenics. (Eugenics and Natural selection are two different things.)
He persecuted the Jews. Not the Christians or the Muslims. So didn't have a contempt for religion, only Judeism.
And most of the German forces were Christians.

And what do you mean by "traditional morality"? Is that as opposed to "liberal morality"?
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Any good? I am trying to keep this light hearted.

[Feck]

Sorry DSI but you are being nice ,Trashing science is something that people who don't have a life-expectancy of 28 do, they will not accept that almost everything in their lives is a product of the science that they claim to hate . You must understand that a doctor does not ask if a patient BELIEVES in medicine before (s)he treats them .
If the morons you are talking to raise the standard creo-ID-mystic-tard shit then they have asked ,not for a reasoned considered, response: but for a torrent of foul abuse ,If they will not tell the truth (and make no mistake they ARE lying !) then why should you bother to take the moral high-ground and actually argue with them .

Any body who claims Unicorns watch over them ,or designed the whole fucking universe for them should be kicked AHAYC (as hard as you can ) in the genitals and as they are flopping around on the ground you should apply a heel to their throat and as they die remind them that man does not live by bread alone !

You think I'm being extreme ? Well no shit Sherlock , according to them ....I am Evil ! and if they were true Christians they would forgive me .

[Deep Sea Isopod]

Sorry DSI but you are being nice ,

I'm always nice.

then why should you bother to take the moral high-ground and actually argue with them .
.

Because I'm the site admin, and unbeknowst to me, there are more "believers" than I thought there was.
Religion has been a no-go subject, namely because one of them is a Prison Chaplain and doesn't like his faith being dissed. (and has stayed away from this topic). I have shared a drink on many occasions with these guys, and are a great bunch. So in order to keep the peace, I need to be "nice". This isn't a site for this type of debate, but I can't let him get away with dissing science. :sighsm:

Just a thought though. This site is all ex-forces, and they're always complaining about the troops not getting the right equipment in Iraq and Afgastlystan. So there's a science route I could go down. Modern warfare equipment.

[Tero]

I've reviewed chemistry papers, and you can tell who did the work without hiding the authors' names so there is usually no point. But it may have changed. I no longer publish, only patent.

[Feck]

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition ?

[Deep Sea Isopod]

I got told off for being off-topic. :sighsm:

I'll call it a win.

[GenesForLife]

How does one respond to this?

The assertion that Science has all the answers to every important question, and that no answers are to be found in any ”unscientific” source, is arrogant in the extreme. This assertion is offensive to anyone who has studied the history of science, for that history is littered with once-fashioable theories that have been discarded as not merely false, but dangerous. It is not hyperbole to say that the infamous dictators of the 20th century — Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot — all believed their tyrranies were justified by Science. Nor is it irrelevant to point out that all of these murderous madmen shared a contempt for religion and traditional morality.

1) Blatant case of fucking projection much?

2) Mythology has come up with jack shit, and also note that "no answers" isn't necessarily equivalent to "no correct answers" , given the cognitive biases of the human mind empirical evidence based reasoning is the only one that has shown itself to be capable of answers that can be independently and reproducibly verified to be correct as opposed to having to take the words of schizophrenics and epileptics babbling about in the desert heat as, to put it rather amusingly, "gospel truth" , more correctly, science is a method to differentiate between competing hypotheses which may be in the remit of anybody to ensure that explanations are properly grounded, and this can only be done by objective means.

Take the phenomenon of "Out of Body" Experiences, for instance.

November 6, 2007 — Researchers are reporting they were able to repeatedly and reliably elicit an "out-of-body" experience in a patient in whom electrodes had been implanted to suppress tinnitus.

"We were able to reproduce the effect at will and in a completely placebo-controlled way, because the patient was not able to tell when the stimulator was on," first author Dirk De Ridder MD, PhD, from the department of neurosurgery at the University Hospital Antwerp, in Belgium, told Medscape Neurology & Neurosurgery.

Their report appears in the November 1 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

An out-of-body experience is a brief subjective episode in which the self is perceived as being outside of the body, with or without the impression of seeing the body from an elevated and distanced perspective, the authors write.

The case reported here was of a 63-year-old man from Denmark who had been referred to their institution and received implanted electrodes overlying the temporoparietal junction on the right side in an attempt to suppress intractable tinnitus.

They had been using a new and more powerful method of stimulation and found the patient had an out-of-body experience with this method. "We stopped immediately and noted the exact parameters of the stimulation," Dr. De Ridder said.

With the patient's permission, they were able to exactly reproduce the sensation, but only at these certain parameters. "When we lowered the stimulation by just 1 V, it didn't happen," he noted.

Because the experiences lasted around 17 seconds, they were able to perform positron emission tomography (PET) scanning in a placebo-controlled way and locate the activation to the temporoparietal junction, or more specifically, the angular–supramarginal gyrus junction and the superior temporal gyrus–sulcus on the right side. Activation was also seen at the right precuneus and posterior thalamus with stimulation, extending into the superior vermis.

"We suggest that activation of these regions is the neural correlate of the disembodiment that is part of the out-of-body experience," they write.

These findings have no implications for the out-of-body experience as it relates to near-death experiences, Dr. De Ridder said. Spontaneous out-of-body experiences have also been previously reported in epileptic patients, those with migraine, and, in a recent report, have been induced in healthy volunteers using a virtual-reality system, although not in this kind of reliable way.

"This is simply a description of the neural network that's involved in the out-of-body experience," he said.

They have some other patients who have electrodes implanted in the same location and may approach them about participating in a further study of this effect, he said. The institutional review board approval for the first patient was to look at side effects and complications of auditory cortex stimulation, so this study was technically covered by that approval, Dr. De Ridder noted. To study this effect in other patients will require a new application.

The authors report no conflict of interest relevant to this article.

The unscientific, or subjective viewpoint here would be that the person was actually able to leave his body, especially in the eyes (pardon the pun) of the one having the experience, while objective evidence showed it to be linked to stimulation of a particular neural pathway, which may , among other things, be caused by brain damage or brain lesions, which themselves have been implicated in increased spirituality and religiosity.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2010) — New research provides fascinating insight into brain changes that might underlie alterations in spiritual and religious attitudes. The study, published by Cell Press in the February 11 issue of the journal Neuron, explores the neural basis of spirituality by studying patients before and after surgery to remove a brain tumor. Although it is well established that all behaviors and experiences, spiritual or otherwise, must originate in the brain, true empirical exploration of the neural underpinnings of spirituality has been challenging. However, recent advances in neuroscience have started to make the complex mental processes associated with religion and spirituality more accessible.

"Neuroimaging studies have linked activity within a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes with spiritual experiences, but information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking," explains lead study author, Dr. Cosimo Urgesi from the University of Udine in Italy.

Dr. Urgesi and colleagues were interested in making a direct link between brain activity and spirituality. They focused specifically on the personality trait called self-transcendence (ST), which is thought to be a measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors in humans. ST reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole.

The researchers combined analysis of ST scores obtained from brain tumor patients before and after they had surgery to remove their tumor, with advanced techniques for mapping the exact location of the brain lesions after surgery. "This approach allowed us to explore the possible changes of ST induced by specific brain lesions and the causative role played by frontal, temporal, and parietal structures in supporting interindividual differences in ST," says researcher Dr. Franco Fabbro from the University of Udine.

The group found that selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions induced a specific increase in ST. "Our symptom-lesion mapping study is the first demonstration of a causative link between brain functioning and ST," offers Dr. Urgesi. "Damage to posterior parietal areas induced unusually fast changes of a stable personality dimension related to transcendental self-referential awareness. Thus, dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors."

These results may even lead to new strategies for treating some forms of mental illness. "If a stable personality trait like ST can undergo fast changes as a consequence of brain lesions, it would indicate that at least some personality dimensions may be modified by influencing neural activity in specific areas," suggests Dr. Salvatore M. Aglioti from Sapienza University of Rome. "Perhaps novel approaches aimed at modulating neural activity might ultimately pave the way to new treatments of personality disorders."

The researchers include Cosimo Urgesi, Universita` di Udine, Udine, Italy, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Eugenio Medea, Pordenone, Italy; Salvatore M. Aglioti, Sapienza Universita` di Roma, Roma, Italy, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Fondazione S. Lucia, Roma, Italy; Miran Skrap, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Santa Maria della Misericordia, Udine, Italy; and Franco Fabbro, Universita` di Udine, Udine, Italy, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Eugenio Medea, Pordenone, Italy.

In other words, subjectivity is not reliable, and the "miracle" at Fatima comes to mind, too, which IIRC was explained without recourse to magic man riding the sun across the sky. So does Derren Brown's illusions, in other words, the only reliable mechanism of verifying anything that is a part of nature is science, and since deities and the figureheads of religions are thought to be intervening with the world, scientific evidence should reveal any such interaction with the physics of the universe, the fact that it hasn't so far means that the theistic position of having to argue that higher standards of evidence are not applicable and that hallucinations should somehow be superior to empirical evidence is laughterworthy.

3) How does the nature of science in that it adapts to new evidence as and when it is uncovered mean that the theistic position of "when doctrine and reality differ, doctrine is right and reality is wrong?" Dogmatic oppression to the point of fucking death is a non-scientific, and not a scientific trait. Learn to fucking learn the basics first.

4) As for the tyrannies, evidence please, and also you may notice one more thing,the term "belief" that you purport that science justified their policies, which is actually bullshit, since science itself is based on evidence, and belief is superfluous to requirements. I believe that the FSM has ordained me to do X and Y and Z , that doesn't mean that the FSM ordained me to do X and Y and Z , stop playing mendacious apologetics, shut the fucking hell up, and back your respective magic men with evidence if you can.

[Ronja]

I've reviewed chemistry papers, and you can tell who did the work without hiding the authors' names so there is usually no point. But it may have changed. I no longer publish, only patent.

The same is true for much of software engineering research, especially such where different approaches to managing software projects or to eliciting requirements or to designing for good usability are compared. Such research needs human subjects, yet organizations that welcome researchers into their midst and allow the results to be published are not that common, Therefore, one research team tends to study the same organization(s) over and over again, and expressions for describing the organization(s) often vary little from one publication to another. Once I have read about "a medium-size software company" which "specializes in reliable sports instruments" and targets "the global market" and have seen the theoretical base or model(s) used in the analysis, I don't need to be told that the company operates from northern Europe - I know who they are and I know which research group does practically all their software process development research. I am usually not 100% sure of who the lead author is, though.

Let's face it - quite many research fields are fairly narrow these days, and if you have done even a modicum of topic-targeted reading, you have an idea of who is studying what in that field.

[Farsight]

How does one respond to this?

The assertion that Science has all the answers to every important question, and that no answers are to be found in any ”unscientific” source, is arrogant in the extreme. This assertion is offensive to anyone who has studied the history of science, for that history is littered with once-fashioable theories that have been discarded as not merely false, but dangerous. It is not hyperbole to say that the infamous dictators of the 20th century — Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot — all believed their tyrannies were justified by Science. Nor is it irrelevant to point out that all of these murderous madmen shared a contempt for religion and traditional morality.

You respond by saying people are people, that science is not immune to the vagaries of human nature, and it's an imperfect world. You say that nevertheless science is an advance on religion because we put our trust in empirical evidence and the scientific method, not blind faith. But all the same it's a grey scale, people are people, we know the difference between hubris and humility, and we offer what we can.