José Duarte, PhD

Author: admin

  • On prestige of universities vs. graduate programs

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    I wanted to clarify something based on a comment by a supporter on the discrimination post. I think this clarification is useful because from my own experience, the general public doesn’t know that the prestige of a university has virtually nothing to do with the prestige of any given graduate program at that university. The…

  • Comment on Verheggen et al.; climate consensus research

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    Here’s my recent Comment on Verheggen et al. in Environmental Science & Technology.  Their core argument in their Reply is that all the non-climate scientists who were invited to participate in this survey because of their climate-related papers – all the psychologists, sociologists, Marxists, economists, palladium experts, etc. – would deny having done any climate-related…

  • I was denied admission to a PhD program because of my perceived political views: reflections of a sellout; how diversity would strengthen social science (Updated)

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    Some of my mentors advised me to take down the post from July 22, 2014 about discrimination because it would hurt me in the job market – that hiring committees would discriminate against me (again) for my perceived political views, or would discriminate against me for documenting past discrimination. So I took it down last week.…

  • Calling volunteer editors, TOC maestros

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    Hi all – I’m looking for volunteers to do some light editing on my longer reports / posts, particularly those on the Cook and Lewandowsky scams. I’d like to migrate that content to the new site, but with better structuring. If anyone is interested in adding a Table of Contents to the longer posts, along…

  • New website… / RStudio

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    Yes, I know promised a new website yesterday. (Sorry, Lucia I deleted that post for no good reason.) I’ve delayed the launch – it wasn’t quite right yet, and I need to focus on dissertation and other work for a couple of days. Speaking of new websites, the RStudio people are awesome and have released…

  • How one paleo-participant can change the outcome of a study

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    Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) authored “The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science” in PLOS ONE. (Paper here.) This study has many of the same features as their Psychological Science scam. In that study, they falsely linked belief in the moon-landing hoax to climate skepticism when in fact only three participants…

  • New Yorker article

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    The New Yorker has a nice article about our BBS paper on the lack of intellectual diversity in social psychology. I cringe a bit at the title: Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans? This was never about political parties, and the lack of diversity goes much deeper than even political philosophy (conservative, liberal, libertarian — that…

  • Heritability of academic prowess

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    Interesting work by Krapohl, et al. in PNAS. I love twin studies. They look comprehensively on the heritability of various factors that contribute to academic achievement, particularly performance on the British* GCSE exams administered during high school. They report that scores are 62% heritable, and that the different traits are from 35 – 58% heritable,…

  • Lewis and Curry

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    This is interesting. Lewis and Curry estimate equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) at 1.64°C. That’s remarkably low. If it turns out to be true – and it seems like we won’t know the true value for ECS for another decade or longer – then AGW would have been largely overstated. The estimates constantly change, which is…

  • Your mileage may vary

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    This is great work: “As expected, across these experiments, the researchers found that the more people smiled, the happier they reported being. But only some people. Surprisingly, for a section of the population, smiling actually reduced well-being. The more these people smiled, the less happy they were. This is like finding that there are some diners who, after consuming a…