I'll take "Poor Thinkers are Also Poor Spellers" for $1000, Alex.

Wow.

I know Microsoft gets hammered around here, but blaming the Challenger disaster (1986) on PowerPoint (1990) is really stretching the facts to match the story.

Bullet points and slide presentations did not start with PowerPoint. If anything, the "bullet point thinking" of the Challenger tragedy shows that we were already experts at presenting information poorly before we had software tools to make us more efficient at it.

...reasonable summary...

Where?

You gotta play to win. They already Godwin-ed the debate.

I got Reader's Digest on the brain

I'll wait for the condensed Reader's Digest version

I see Al-Qaeda as more of an agency, or employment center. They are definitely little more than one of many middlemen that executes(?) a purchase order from the nation states that need their services, a procurement office for weapons and personnel, passports, credit cards, you name it. They might even have an iStore. Either way it is a facade, a front, in the global terror business. They attract everybody's attention, while their financiers are off to Monaco!

Sounds like a great idea until they take up residence in your house.

They normally huddle in trees. But the eaves and soffits of your house are much better for huddling in to stay warm, because besides being cozy and secluded, they naturally collect heat during the day. It is a very annoying process to exclude the bats without killing them once they're moved in, and once they're out you have to immediately seal every opening over 1/4 inch in diameter or they'll come back. Yes, that small.

It's faster than a donkey...

Really, man! If I wanted to bring in some serious race baiting, I would just post the ratio of traffic stops, not count licenses.

This is a general problem in science (not just biomedical research). I'm a physicist, and we see the same sorts of issues.

It all comes down to how academic research is funded and judged: number of papers, number of students graduated, and amount of money raised. Inside granting agencies, this is how different research efforts are compared to determine which programs get (more) funding and who gets cut. The importance of the work, the correctness of the work, and the ethical behavior (or not) of the researchers are not considered. Scientists are not stupid, if those are the metrics used to determine funding, they optimize for those things.

If we want to fix science we need a different set of metrics.

I'd suggest replacing the three metrics above with: number of validated results, public interest, and amount of private investment in the work. This would apply specifically to government granting programs.

"Validated results" requires a third party to validate, that should be government labs validating academic/commercial work (we're talking about reviews of government grants) and the opposite for new work done at government labs.

"Public interest" is much easier to track now than it used to be. A simple metric would just be google search ranking (although I'm sure something better could be used).

Private investment may seem overly commercial to some people, but we have a big problem right now with a lack of development of scientific work. Last year was the first time since 2000 that private investment in startup companies exceeded government investment in basic research (in the US). Commercialization is much more expensive than basic research; we're still only passing on a fraction of the potential practical work. We need to motivate people doing basic research to work more with industry (where appropriate, right). In addition, you have several diseases (usually "orphans") where private donations for disease research are greater than government investment (i.e. Lyme disease). Maybe that's fine, but the granting folks need to take a look at why that is and whether they're really investing public dollars where they need to go.

Lastly, I would change the system every 10 years or so. The longer any set metric is used, the more likely it is that people are gaming the system rather than working in the public interest.

It's the Dilbert Principal at work. Companies tend to promote their least-competent employees to management in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.