This came from FB, but I lost track of who it came from.
I will preface this comment by saying that I'm about to be terrible but this is like so, so old. I contributed to the original twitter thingie back however many ages ago.
Yeah, well, sure. But these have added stock photography.
2: So it will be only a year or two until something about it appears in the NYT.
There's that.
A postdoc in my department had her gorilla spit samples held up by customs for like a year. I googled to check that one entry wasn't her, but no.
Did you know that if you import species that need to be quarantined, you have to go feed them yourself? Friggin' US facilities won't do any feed or care for your invasive exotic species.
And yes to 2.
I have to explain to trainees that 16 hours = I went home for the day and dealt with it the next morning. More than 24 h means over the weekend. They are often very surprised.
It's hard to expect them to just keep a guy who knows how to feed a gorilla on payroll.
Ditto 2 and 6. Aren't scientists way out on the frontiers of social media!
The N in all my studies so far is wholly arbitrary, for pseudonymity-ablating reasons. So far nobody has balked, for pseudonymity-ablating reasons.
"eroding" would have been a better word choice there, really. I don't get to talk about ablation enough, though.
I didn't think it myself, but I nodded along when I read Mark Kleiman's assessment of that bit where people explain their theses. When they aren't writing for an academic audience, they have such nice clear prose!
7: Throwing food in a cage shouldn't require specialized training. Bet there's even a Purina Gorilla Lab Chow.
9: Surely you can justify your N with handwaving and statistics no one in the field will understand.
12.2: "This N was randomly sampled from the subspace of big enough N"
12.1: Then you have to get the poop out.
12.1: Yes, as I recall the Regional Primate Research Center I worked at used Purina Monkey Chow.
Don't the gorillas throw it back at the staffer in a quid pro quo for the chow?
13: Kind of, but with equations. The more complicated the better.
Yeah in my (larger) field, the equations, uh, don't have to be very complicated. (My subfield, maybe more so.)
17: Sorry, was riffing off the previously-linked happiness ratio debunking where even the corresponding author didn't follow the math behind the ratio.
18: right, yeah, no. But that field is notorious for lack of mathematical sophistication, and even a very simple equation would be enough to flummox them. If you catch my drift.
Yeah in my (larger) field, the equations, uh, don't have to be very complicated. (My subfield, maybe more so.)
Would you say that your field is served by evasive language, or implications for claims which can't be proven (or which some other experimenter may be able to prove false)?
I suppose that would only work in the implied sciences.
Do y'all know that when I first started commenting here I was paranoid that someone else would start up commenting as textualist (later mercifully shortened to text) and steal my acclaim? Of course that was ridiculous as I was at best grudgingly acknowledged. But it did happen once or twice -- the first time it occurred, the person who was falsely claiming to be text came clean though and introduced herself as Judy, I asked if she was drunk, and we all had a laugh. Or maybe it was just me having a laugh.
I suppose I was flattered, since Judy came clean right away. But a different satisfaction would come from telling an equivocating jackass that he could never be me.
18: and that author's "but aside from the math, all my research is still valid" follow up was really painful to read. It must suck to get swindled by a coauthor like that.
Does the follow-up count as another publication? Because two papers is better than one.
24: Yeah, extremely painful. The math was just an amusing diversion! My groundbreaking research shows that happy people are positive! Or vice versa! Keep buying my books!
I feel worse for the folks who worked with the psychologist (also previously discussed here) who fabricated all the raw data since that would be harder to verify than analysis.
They should do like Burt and falsify data only for work with solo authorship.
I don't actually know if he had coauthors or not.
Bet there's even a Purina Gorilla Lab Chow.
To tie this to the Soylent thread: one of my fellow grad students bought a 50 lb bag of ape chow, figuring that he and his vet student wife could subsist on it during busy periods.
They tried it. Then they tried to feed it to their dog. The dog refused to eat it.
So they bought a gorilla to avoid waste?
Pretty sure it's still in their basement. We're just a few hours away from Pittsburgh and I bet they'd sell it to you cheap.