Well, it's mostly just my impression, although lately it doesn't seem like a very close call. But I did once see a poster at a conference that dissected portrayals of various occupations in a broad selection of movies. It was partly tongue-in-cheek, but the end result was that in terms of negative portrayals, the leading occupation was murderer (I guess that's an occupation), and coming in at #2 was scientist.

I'm torn about this. On the one hand, it's certainly true that science is overwhelmingly portrayed in mainstream American society as evil, or at least not good, and anything that contributes to this view is upsetting. On the other hand, there are some serious structural problems with the way science is practiced that desperately need to be addressed, and when someone like John Ioannidis or Jonathan Schooler points them out, I think it's important that they be taken very seriously. These problems have especially immediate implications when we're talking about things like drug studies, but they span the sciences.

It's tempting to reconcile these opposing motivations by saying that science should handle these things in-house. But scientists don't have a good record when it comes to self-policing. So I'm not sure how to feel about articles like this. My sincere (possibly futile) hope is that these things will be reported in a way that makes it clear that improving science is a worthwhile goal, and does not imply that all previous findings are false. Note that Ioannidis's articles have some sensational titles, but the contents are much more level-headed.

Everyone is irresponsible occasionally, and it's far from irrational to be irresponsible in this case. For the entirety of my life, I've never been surprised by a gas-powered car sneaking up on me, because they're noisy.

You're also making a very bizarre and patently false assumption that pedestrians always know when to look. Perhaps you're only familiar with urban living? When I take my dog or my child for a walk, I need to know whenever a car is coming up behind me -- not just when I'm crossing a street, or at well-defined checkpoints, but on a continual basis. It's just not reasonable to tell me that I should continually swivel my head around every time I take a walk. Right now, when I hear a car coming up behind me, I turn around, decide if the driver is a threat, and take appropriate action. Fortunately, the most erratic drivers in my neighborhood don't drive electric cars yet. But that will change.

It's nonsense to say that tire noise is sufficient. Tire noise is quieter than engine noise, so if you rely entirely on tire noise, there will be circumstances (wind, distant lawnmower noises, etc.) in which the tire noise is not audible and engine noise would be. The bottom line is that making cars quieter violates reasonable expectations. Everyone who's grown up with cars knows how to tell the difference between a car coming, no car coming, and can't-tell. If you put a lot of cars out there that are much quieter than the quietest cars previously on the road, then people will inevitably sometimes think there's no car coming when in fact they can't tell.

Also, it sounds like you've never had a pedestrian jump out in front of you from behind a parked car. It's easy to show that you can be driving 20km/hr and have no chance whatsoever of avoiding a pedestrian if they happen to run out just at the wrong time. Some of those pedestrians were going to get hit no matter what, but some of them might have heard engine noise.

The issue here isn't protecting people who act unreasonably, it's protecting people who act reasonably.

It's not an arms race. Once the cars are loud enough to hear on a quiet street, nobody needs them to get any louder. The problem is that everyone on the planet has grown up in an environment in which relative quiet means no car is coming. It doesn't matter one bit if the car sounds are drowned out. Nobody steps out into the street without looking just because it's really noisy and they can't tell if a car's coming or not. People used to do that, but they're all dead now.

Tire noise is not always audible, certainly not above a light wind if the street is dry. Everyone who lives in the suburbs and goes for a walk occasionally knows this. Electric cars can make useful noises without being anywhere near as noisy as gas-powered cars.

The issue here is not requiring everything that might hurt you to carry a warning. The issue is whether or not it's okay to have things that have carried warnings for the entire lifetime of everyone now living to suddenly stop doing so. It's not.

Bicycle riders can indeed hurt you, but (a) they tend to be less fatal than cars when they strike pedestrians; (b) bicyclists are aware of the fact that they're inaudible (in fact, many have bells or horns); and (c) nobody on this planet has grown up in an environment in which bicycles always make loud noises. Should we be worried about defective noise makers on cars? Probably not if they're as rare as defective steering, defective drivers, etc.

Some guy who lives in the Sahara gets a dog, decides to put in a fence, digs a hole, cuts through a cable, and boom -- no electricity for half the world.

Most people, as they get older, find it harder to get into new games, new music, new movies, new food, new sports, new friends, etc. Getting into new stuff takes effort, uninterrupted time, attention span, and a certain kind of ignorance that comes with youth and that lets you see warmed-over crap as exciting and fresh. You eventually reach an age at which it's hard to find anything that seems genuinely worth your excitement; you get jaded . It doesn't work that way for everyone in every arena, but that's generally how it goes.

Asking why we can't do three-digit multiplication quickly even though our brains is complex is sort of like asking why a toaster can't tell you ratios of voltages even though it has resistors in it. It's the difference between what a machine does and how it works. Brains are fabulously complex, but one thing they weren't built for is three-digit multiplication. Does the brain "know" how to do multiplication really really fast? Yes, of course, there are all kinds of things going on in the brain that involve multiplication. Does it know how to do it with numbers that come in through the ears, and spew the answer out through your mouth? No, brains weren't built to do that. They were, however, built (so to speak) to do much more complicated (but different) things, like recognizing threats and understanding spoken language.

I don't know how good the router analogy will turn out to be, but it's not exactly breaking news that some things need attended, more-or-less serial processing, and that mental arithmetic is one of them. The things that don't need as much attention are things that are evolutionarily old and more or less built-in. Extremely overlearned tasks can fake it sometimes. Guys like Hal Pashler and Stan Dehaene are always making progress into understanding how and why these things work, but the idea of processing bottlenecks in cognitive function is very old. The router analogy is probably a bad one, because it's unlikely that the brain's router lives in any very specific place. It's more likely a property of how the brain adapts to tasks it wasn't designed for.

Ioannidis has a long history of publishing articles describing basic mistakes researchers make in understanding and reporting research. Although this titles of his articles have a sort of "the sky is falling" kind of quality, the contents of the articles are very level-headed. He certainly does not argue that science or scientific findings are in general worthless, only that there are things we should correct in scientific practice that would improve the situation markedly. In broad outline, no practicing scientist could possibly disagree, although of course the particulars are always up for debate. Although he covers some ground that others have as well, he seems to have made it a focus of his career, and writes more level-headedly than most.

Many of his articles are easily readable by non-specialists, and at least a few are available for free (see pubmed).

No. Big problems for big pharma are things like polticians who won't take payoffs, regulatory agencies, whistleblowers, class action lawsuits, etc. The placebo effect is a well known (if not well understood) and in most cases easily accomodated phenomenon that causes them no problems whatsoever. Even if they were doing all their research honestly and competently, it wouldn't cause any problems at all for either big pharma or any competent scientist. Problems are things that don't have easy or palatable solutions.

That's an important point, and of course another reason why the 6% figure is surprisingly high. Backlist books are slowly making their way into ebook format, but the coverage is still very spotty. It looks like it will be a long, drawn-out process, probably worse than what happened with CDs.

What comes after early adopters? On-time adopters and late adopters. Tablet sales are expected to explode over the next year, and pretending that the market is saturated just because the early adopters have already adopted seems willfully ignorant. My impressoin is that e-book sales aren't about to slow down, they're about to speed up. The summary suggests that 6% is somehow a disappointing percentage of the total market for new books. That's ridiculous. 6% is an astonishing accomplishment given how few people own e-book readers or tablets.

As a Kindle owner, I second all of these comments. The Kindle is the best e-book reader (for me) right now, but it's not the best e-book reader I can imagine. That's okay, it only cost $140, and for all its flaws it's a pleasure to read books on it. It's good enough for me to prefer new books in electronic format. I'll buy something better in a year or so, and something better a year or so again after that.

I'm actually astonished that e-books account for an appreciable percentage of the book market. My informal survey of fellow train riders suggests that the percentage of readers who own e-readers is tiny.

How is it possible that no one has yet posted this link?