American taxpayers spend $30 billion annually funding biomedical research. By some estimates, half of the results from these studies can't be replicated elsewhere-the science is simply wrong. Often, research institutes and academia emphasize publishing results over getting the right answers, incentivizing poor experimental design, improper methods, and sloppy statistics. Bad science doesn't just hold back medical progress, it can sign the equivalent of a death sentence. How are those with breast cancer helped when the cell on which 900 papers are (...) based turns out not to be a breast cancer cell at all? How effective could a new treatment for ALS be when it failed to cure even the mice it was initially tested on? In Rigor Mortis, award-winning science journalist Richard F. Harris reveals these urgent issues with vivid anecdotes, personal stories, and interviews with the nation's top biomedical researchers. We need to fix our dysfunctional biomedical system-now. (shrink)

Psychedelics have been recognized as model interventions for studying altered states of consciousness. However, few empirical studies of the shamanic state of consciousness, which is anecdotally similar to the psychedelic state, exist. We investigated the neural correlates of shamanic trance using high-density electroencephalography (EEG) in 24 shamanic practitioners and 24 healthy controls during rest, shamanic drumming, and classical music listening, followed by an assessment of altered states of consciousness. EEG data were used to assess changes in absolute power, connectivity, signal (...) diversity, and criticality, which were correlated with assessment measures. We also compared assessment scores to those of individuals in a previous study under the influence of psychedelics. Shamanic practitioners were significantly different from controls in several domains of altered states of consciousness, with scores comparable to or exceeding that of healthy volunteers under the influence of psychedelics. Practitioners also displayed increased gamma power during drumming that positively correlated with elementary visual alterations. Furthermore, shamanic practitioners had decreased low alpha and increased low beta connectivity during drumming and classical music and decreased neural signal diversity in the gamma band during drumming that inversely correlated with insightfulness. Finally, criticality in practitioners was increased during drumming in the low and high beta and gamma bands, with increases in the low beta band correlating with complex imagery and elementary visual alterations. These findings suggest that psychedelic drug-induced and non-pharmacologic alterations in consciousness have overlapping phenomenal traits but are distinct states of consciousness, as reflected by the unique brain-related changes during shamanic trance compared to previous literature investigating the psychedelic state. (shrink)

China's environmental problems are well known, but recently its record in the area of wildlife conservation, particularly with regard to endangered species, has come under scrutiny. Environmental values colour how we in the West view both China's past experience with wildlife and what strategies it should adopt to foster better conservation. Chinese have long taken a utilitarian view of wildlife, valuing species primarily as resources for man's use and only secondarily for other reasons. However, China has not developed institutions capable (...) of sustaining the desired use of wildlife in the face of ever-growing demands. I suggest that Western criticisms of Chinese utilitarian attitudes are inappropriate, ineffective, and possibly counter-productive: deep-seated cultural mores change slowly. Instead, Westerners concerned with the fate of China's wildlife should assist the development of systems that act to channel demand for wildlife 's material benefits toward investment in conservation. Such systems will likely require devolution of considerable control to local levels, strengthening incentives to favour long-over short-term benefits, and – notwithstanding common Western attitudes – substantial consumptive use of wildlife. (shrink)

Global human population expansion is rooted in a remarkably successful evolutionary innovation. The neolithic transformation of the natural world gave rise to a symbiosis between humans and their domesticated plant and animal partners that will expand from a current 20 per cent to 60 percent of terrestrial biomass by the middle of the coming century. Such an increase must necessarily be accompanied by a concomitant decrease in wildlife biomass. We suggest that current trends in population growth are unlikely to abate (...) for three reasons: first, there are intrinsic biological pressures to reproduce regardless of social engineering; second, the character of the domestic alliance makes it a formidable competitor to wildlife; and third, the timeframe before population doubling is, from a biological perspective, virtually instantaneous. This paper draws from a wide body of research in the biological and social sciences. We neither condone nor endorse this picture of inexorable population increase. Rather, we appeal for a change in the nature of the discussion of population among environmentalists, to focus on the question of how best to manage what wildlife will be left on the margins of a domesticated world. (shrink)

Whilst media and political rhetoric in Britain is sceptical and often outright damning of the (presumed) morals and behaviours of the White marginalized poor, our aim is to explore the conditions under which successful communities are nevertheless built. Specifically, we examine the features of community and stress its importance both for belonging and bonding around shared norms and practices and for fostering the necessary bridging essential for interacting and cooperating with others. In considering what it means to foster a community (...) that acts as a breakwater against the tides of stigma or disadvantage, we pay special attention to what we will call enabling conditions – essential features that communities either can or should be able to provide or that exist independent of communities and are indispensable for accessing opportunities in the wider society. We detail the dynamics of White poverty and exclusion before turning our attention to possible responses to these challenges. In searching for viable responses to stigma and disadvantage, we compare some different typologies of community presently available to the White poor in Britain and examine whether these are sufficient to satisfy the enabling conditions associated with more robust forms of group membership. (shrink)

Despite publication of many well-argued critiques of null hypothesis testing (NHT), behavioral science researchers continue to rely heavily on this set of practices. Although we agree with most critics' catalogs of NHT's flaws, this article also takes the unusual stance of identifying virtues that may explain why NHT continues to be so extensively used. These virtues include providing results in the form of a dichotomous (yes/no) hypothesis evaluation and providing an index (p value) that has a justifiable mapping onto confidence (...) in repeatability of a null hypothesis rejection. The most-criticized flaws of NHT can be avoided when the importance of a hypothesis, rather than the p value of its test, is used to determine that a finding is worthy of report, and when p = /05 is treated as insufficient basis for confidence in the replicability of an isolated non-null finding. Together with many recent critics of NHT, we also urge reporting of important hypothesis tests in enough descriptive detail to permit secondary uses such as meta-analysis. (shrink)

Chow's book should be read only by those who already have a firm enough grasp of the logic of significance testing to separate the few valid, insightful points from the many incorrect statements and misrepresentations.

Although pioneering studies using statistical methods in geographical data analysis were published in the 1930s, it was only in the 1960s that their increasing use in human geography led to a claim that a ‘quantitative revolution’ had taken place. The widespread use of quantitative methods from then on was associated with changes in both disciplinary philosophy and substantive focus. The first decades of the ‘revolution’ saw quantitative analyses focused on the search for spatial order of a geometric form within an, (...) often implicit, logical positivist framework. In the first of three reviews of the use of quantitative methods in human geography, this progress report uncovers their origin with regard to the underlying philosophy, the focus on spatial order, and the nature of the methods deployed. Subsequent reports will outline the changes in all three that occurred in later decades and will chart the contemporary situation. (shrink)

Although pioneering studies using statistical methods in geographical data analysis were published in the 1930s, it was only in the 1960s that their increasing use in human geography led to a claim that a ‘quantitative revolution’ had taken place. The widespread use of quantitative methods from then on was associated with changes in both disciplinary philosophy and substantive focus. The first decades of the ‘revolution’ saw quantitative analyses focused on the search for spatial order of a geometric form within an, (...) often implicit, logical positivist framework. In the first of three reviews of the use of quantitative methods in human geography, this progress report uncovers their origin with regard to the underlying philosophy, the focus on spatial order, and the nature of the methods deployed. Subsequent reports will outline the changes in all three that occurred in later decades and will chart the contemporary situation. (shrink)