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Favorite Scientific Paper?

SteveGrenard said:
I am asking my medical library to order me a full text today and I should have it in a few days.
Bump.

This statement is now ten days old. A few days after it was made, Steve got suspended for finally pushing the copyright violation rule a bit too far. Nevertheless, the suspension was up on the 25th, I think, and it's now the 29th. Plenty of time for that paper to have landed on Steve's desk.

Has he reappeared anywhere? Can we dare to hope that he's gone off in the huff? But if he hasn't, I'd like him to give his opinion on the full text of the paper. Vehement arguing on the basis of an abstract alone is a bit pointless, especially when the person you're arguing with (Geni) had the full text in front of him the entire time, in spite of Steve's repeated assertions that he couldn't have it.

Well, thanks for the copy, Geni, it was indeed interesting. But I still want to hear Steve's considered opinion.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Bump.

This statement is now ten days old. A few days after it was made, Steve got suspended for finally pushing the copyright violation rule a bit too far. Nevertheless, the suspension was up on the 25th, I think, and it's now the 29th. Plenty of time for that paper to have landed on Steve's desk.

Has he reappeared anywhere? Can we dare to hope that he's gone off in the huff? But if he hasn't, I'd like him to give his opinion on the full text of the paper. Vehement arguing on the basis of an abstract alone is a bit pointless, especially when the person you're arguing with (Geni) had the full text in front of him the entire time, in spite of Steve's repeated assertions that he couldn't have it.

Well, thanks for the copy, Geni, it was indeed interesting. But I still want to hear Steve's considered opinion.

Rolfe.
Rolfe,

Steve is monitoring JREF and commenting about it elsewhere. No posts here so far, though.
 
The danger model of immunity by Polly Matzinger really answered a lot of problems I had with the immune response's ability to discriminate self from non-self. She is a charismatic speaker too.

Matzinger P (1994) Tolerance, danger and the extended family Ann. Rev. Immunol 12: 991-1045.
 
Oh, I'd completely forgotten about this thread! Steve going ballistic trying to defend a piece of woo-woo he neither practises nor understands, simply because some of us here think it's woo-woo. (And in the process demonstrating that he actually reads very little of what is posted to him in a thread he is reading.)

Steve, before you decide to attack a scientific paper, it's usual actually to read the thing.

He said he'd ordered the paper. He was going to read it, then trash it before our eyes. Well, as with most publications, it's not watertight. There are a few wrinkles one could reasonably chew over. In fact I chewed over several with Geni by PM and email, and we concluded that the objections could pretty much be countered and overall the authors had put forward a pretty good case. But still, it would have been interesting to hear Steve's take on the whole thing.

Six months, eh? I wonder if he ever actually read the paper? I wonder if he understood more than one word in ten? Come to that I wonder if he ever received it? Or even ordered it in the first place?

So much for reasoned discussion.

Rolfe.
 
This one definitely makes my top 10.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10626367&dopt=Abstract

Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

Kruger J, Dunning D.

Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-7601, USA. jkruger@s.psych.uiuc.edu

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Full text here:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache...d+Self-Assessments,"&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2
 
Lighthill M. J., 1952 On sound generated aerodynamically. Part I: General theory. Procedings of the Royal Society A 211:564--587.

Total genius. The Navier--Stokes equations, the equivalent of grand unifcation for fluid mechanics had been around for a hundred years, and the wave equation that governs acoustics was even older, but no one could explain how the sound power of a turbulent jet varied with its speed. Just as this was starting to become a serious environmental problem Lighthill showed how a simple rearrangement of the 28-year-old Lighthill (who'd already been a full professor for two years) showed how a simple rearrangement of the Navier--Stokes equations but the wave equation on one side so that everything on the other side can be considered the source of the sound. This allowed him to deduce that sound power scales with the eighth power of speed, and inaugurated the now-thriving field of aeroacoustics.
 
jj, the fact that you have posted something so sexy has made me question my orientation. Claude Shannon is one of my personal heroes.

Eww! TMI :)

Seriously, I used to work at "Claude Shannon AT&T Research Labs."
 

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