No one's suggesting they 'stay silent'. Not endorsing a specific candidate when it appears to actually undermine trust/interest in their research and in science as a whole isn't staying silent. Ignoring their own research while asking others to 'listen to the science' seems an odd position for a journal to take.
"When shown one photo each of a gay and straight man, both chosen at random, the model distinguished between them correctly 81% of the time. When shown five photos of each man, it attributed sexuality correctly 91% of the time. The model performed worse with women, telling gay and straight apart with 71% accuracy after looking at one photo, and 83% accuracy after five. In both cases the level of performance far outstrips human ability to make this distinction. Using the same images, people could tell gay from straight 61% of the time for men, and 54% of the time for women. This aligns with research which suggests humans can determine sexuality from faces at only just better than chance."
I'm no expert but the guy who was the author is a medical doctor who knows very little about programming. So I'm sure you're right -- but he just wanted to use pre-existing tech.
Got to agree with the points made about phys.org I'm afraid. The Economist article at least links to the research article and the researchers' website.
I think their point is that you can gain some fascinating insights about science in history when different disciplines work together. Hardly a radical insight though I agree. But that's not why I posted the article, which is mostly describing the cool research rather well.
Fascinating effort to formalize a medieval treatise - De Luce (“On Light”, written around 1225) - about the origins of the universe into modern mathematics. What the researchers discovered and why they did this is explained at The Ordered Universe Project.
http://ordered-universe.com/
Their paper on this was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society but can be found on arXiv.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.0769
I think the key part of this research is that this adds significantly to the evidence that there's liquid water deep in the crust of Mars. We know that there is water in the form of ice in lots of places on Mars but the idea of subsurface liquid water is exciting because there might be life in there! If it's gushing up to the surface periodically, we might even be able to sample it and see if there's signs of life! There's been previous evidence of these streaks before - but researchers had generally thought that was due to ice melting during the planet's warm season. Now they've found "streaks near the equator, including in the gargantuan Valles Marineris canyon". Any subsurface ice here would likely have sublimated. So it's looking pretty likely that this is subsurface liquid water that is leaking out from time to time.
An alternative explanation - dust avalanches - was offered when the same scientists unveiled their initial results back in 2011. With the observation of so many streaks at the equator now the simplest explanation appears to be groundwater welling up to the surface. Similar streaks on Antarctica are known to be caused by water.
Goodman has since responded to this allegation (it's in the story): "I did not review the data in the Séralini study, nor did I have anything to do with the determination that the paper should be withdrawn from or retained by the journal." The decision was already made by the previous editor. Indeed, despite peer review, papers are withdrawn every day. That's because peer review isn't perfect but the best possible system that's available.
From the piece>>>
Rocha-e-Silva says the agreement grew out of frustration with his country’s fixation on impact factor. In Brazil, an agency in the education ministry, called CAPES, evaluates graduate programmes in part by the impact factors of the journals in which students publish research. As emerging Brazilian journals are in the lowest ranks, few graduates want to publish in them. This vicious cycle, in his view, prevents local journals improving.
Well, the headline reflects the message of the study accurately enough it seems. The caveats about the simulation not taking into account the physics of the system are in the news piece. The study itself was published in a peer reviewed journal-so whatever its weaknesses, it's not to be completely shrugged off.
And Nature News have replied: As far as I can see, we have not reached any definitive conclusions about what will happen in the wild. The article warns what -could- happen and the -possible- consequences of such transgene spread. The sentence that you cite is a direct quote from Brian Ford-Lloyd, a plant geneticist at the University of Birmingham, UK (as the article clearly notes), who was unoconnected with the current study. He goes on to say: “This is one of the most clear examples of extremely plausible damaging effects [of GM crops] on the environment.”
If you take issue with -his- conclusions, why not contact him?
One of the key findings here is that, contrary to what many have argued, transgenes -may- confer some value/advantages to wild species. At least, this is no longer something that can be ruled out.
Apparently whether transgenes spread from GM crops to wild species remains controversial - though there have been some reports of this happening in the past. http://www.nature.com/news/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm-cr...
>>In 2003, Snow and her colleagues showed that when Bt sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) were bred with their wild counterparts, transgenic offspring still required the same kind of close care as its cultivated parent but were less vulnerable to insects and produced more seeds than non-transgenic plants. Few similar studies have been conducted, says Snow, because the companies that own the rights to the technology are generally unwilling to let academic researchers perform the experiments.<<
Apologies (one of Nature's editors here). Believe it or not it was in terabytes when we sent the copy to our sub-editors (ie copy editors) and they changed it because they thought our readers wouldn't get it. We're as bemused as you.