Archive for 2019

CALEB HOWE: This Fawning NBC News Article on Pete Buttigieg is Worse Than a Glorified Press Release; It’s Sanctified.

Data geek Mayor Pete is a leader. He is data-driven. Really smart. He’s brash. And dynamic. Bold. Has the best education in the world. He has fancy degrees, but the confidence to govern with heart, and the brain to govern with data.

It may seem like that is an exaggerated description, but all of that is taken from this single NBC News article about 2020 Democratic hopeful Pete Buttigieg. And those are just the words in isolation, they can’t really convey the depth of the hagiography posted as news by NBC on this candidate.

Read the whole thing.

NEW REPORT ON CAMPUS SEPARATISM:  Congratulations to the National Association of Scholars for taking on the issue of campus neo-segregation.  For too long, colleges and universities have been giving in to student demands for separate dormitories, separate graduation ceremonies, separate student relaxation areas, etc.  This is an important issue, so I hope to be saying more about it soon …

BAD SCIENCE: Rein in the four horsemen of irreproducibility. “More than four decades into my scientific career, I find myself an outlier among academics of similar age and seniority: I strongly identify with the movement to make the practice of science more robust. It’s not that my contemporaries are unconcerned about doing science well; it’s just that many of them don’t seem to recognize that there are serious problems with current practices. By contrast, I think that, in two decades, we will look back on the past 60 years — particularly in biomedical science — and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research.”