New case of scientific fraud

In a previous Math Drudge blog, we mentioned the increasing number of instances of scientific fraud. We also noted how in many cases, mathematical and statistical methods have been utilized to uncover this fraud.

In November 2011, Netherlands psychologist Diederik Stapel was accused of publishing “several dozen” articles with falsified data. For example, one article claimed that disordered environments such as littered streets make people more prone to stereotyping and discrimination. After being accused of massive fraud in Science, Stapel confessed that the allegations were largely correct.

Now another Netherlands social scientist is in hot water. Some clever statistical analysis

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Bad numbers are bad news

We woke up last Friday (in Oz) and Thursday (in the US). As usual, we scanned a selection of online newspapers, magazines and blogs: “Eurozone crisis will cost world’s poorest countries $238bn” blared the UK Guardian (once known as the Manchester Grauniad because of its typographic lapses). Really, not $237 billion or $239 billion? Perhaps this was just a dodgy headline. Sadly it was not — the article soberly reports that the cost will be exactly this figure, an impossible level of certainty for an economic forecast!

Many other such examples come to mind. On 18 Oct 2006, the venerable

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New paper on visualizing digits of pi

The present bloggers, together with Francisco Aragon Artacho (University of Newcastle, Australia) and Peter Borwein (Simon Fraser University, Canada, and Jonathan Borwein’s brother), have just completed the paper Tools for visualizing real numbers: Planar number walks.

This manuscript describes analysis of the digits of pi and many other real numbers and quantifies various techniques of modern computer visualization. In most of these analyses, the authors address a real number (represented in base-4 digits, i.e., 0, 1, 2, 3) as a “random walk,” typically by moving one unit east, north, west or south, depending on whether the digit at a given

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Feast or famine? Promoting green energy in an era of abundant gas and oil

Introduction

Since the middle of the last decade, well before the worldwide run-up in fuel prices during 2008, it has been widely believed that we are entering a new era of scarcity in carbon-based fuels such as oil and natural gas. Such concerns are not new, having first become prevalent in the 1970s. However, a rather quiet revolution is taking place on both fronts, leading to a new era of abundance that may prove as problematic as scarcity.

U.S. production

The United States, long an international symbol of profligate energy consumption, with a thirsty appetite for imported oil and gas,

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