P.C. Shannon

The new Google Video service has garnered universally bad reviews. But after watching Best Week Ever, Caroline and I may have found a use for it. The show featured a hillarious video of a kid singing Pokemon karaoke. And a search for “pokemon” on the Google service yielded this gem. Pure magic. Or as Caroline said, “My head just exploded.”

Nature reports:

The university committee looking into scientific misconduct in the laboratory of South Korean cloner Woo Suk Hwang announced on 10 January that his 2004 claim to have cloned a human embryo was fake. But his Afghan hound Snuppy is a real clone.

I’ve written about this research before, and now it all turns out to be fake. The greatest damage done by this scandal is the way it will affect the general’s public’s perception of science and of therapeutic cloning in particular. I still think this is an avenue that needs to be fully explored, in spite of temporary set backs.

The Nature article also discusses the number of human ova that Hwang went through in the course of his research and the ways he obtained them. Apparently, he coerced female lab members to donate. That’s bad. American standards require that egg donors receive no compensation.

The problem is that donating eggs involves surgery and the injection of large amounts of hormones, so that the woman “superovulates” and produces multiple eggs rather than the single one that she would normally produce. In fact, donating eggs (at least for money, I don’t know about research purposes) is legally in many European countries because it is considered to be quite dangerous.

I mean, it’s like they’re donating a kidney not to save some sick kid, but for research purposes. Doesn’t it seem like they should get some compensation for that?

I'm amazed at how the brain works. For instance, there's a word that I've been trying to remember for the better part of a year. I'll want to use it in a conversation, because it perfectly captures what I want to say, but I can't, because I can never remember it. This word means “that which is directly observed” and is frequently used in high school discussions of the scientific method (which makes this problem all the more embarassing). I've actually come across it once or twice in this quest, but I can't seem to hang on to it. I keep thinking it is or is similar to “epistemological” because the first sound is the same and they both have to do with knowledge.

How can I know that? How can I know what a word means and what it sounds like but not know the word itself? It's really quite amazing.

I looked the word up before I started writing this, but now I've forgotten it again. Which leads me to my real conclusion: I'm just getting old.

That word, by the way, is “empirical.”

Nature, the leading scientific journal, recently conducted a peer review of articles in both Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. The editors at the journal sent out articles to experts in various scientific disciplines and asked them to grade the articles for accuracy. The experts did not know the source of the articles they were sent.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

That works out to an average of about 4 errors per Wikipedia article and 3 per article in Brittanica. Considering the price of each, that’s not bad at all.

My attitude about Wikipedia all along has been this: I certainly wouldn’t cite it as a source, but for casual interest or if you need to quickly bone up on something, it’s great. But you get what you pay for. You also have to be at least a little skeptical about what you get out of Wikipedia because any ignoramus or idiot with an agenda can edit it. It’s a handy reference and a good starting point, but I wouldn’t use it for any serious work.