I don't think you understand statistics, do you? That's the point of giving a standard error on your result: to qualify how well or how poorly you know anything. That way your reader can judge if your results are meaningful. If you're too lazy to calculate that (hint: it's only mildly harder than an average), don't report anything. What they did report means nothing without it, not the other way around.

Given how much time they spent on making fancy graphs that tells us nothing of value (see above), they really don't have an excuse.

Agreed! And the report is woefully incomplete. You never report means without some sort of estimate of the standard deviation/standard error associated with the measurement. I can't tell if the difference in the average number of spikes is meaningful or not without knowing how tightly the results were clustered.

(My guess is "not very tightly," given that it sounds like the highest and lowest numbers of spikes (average) were the same planes, basically. That suggests that their method is flawed or that the results are that the means are basically the same to within any useful sense.)

Yes, but so have cats. Cats, in fact, may have done as much for our species as dogs have. It's just been a lot less visible for much of our development.

Cats moved into our agricultural fields and our food storage areas on their own (they self-domesticated) to hunt the vermin that were eating out food supplies. Cats have literally been protecting our most precious resource, but they've been doing quietly and generally aloof from human interaction. Sure, you can argue that cats are doing it because that's where the prey are, but aren't dogs benefiting from domestication the same way?

And let's not forget that the vermin control has almost certainly done a lot to reduce the number of plagues humanity has endured. We remember the ones that the cats didn't stop, but there probably would have been more.

So not to dismiss the contribution of canines to human development, but I think I wouldn't dismiss cats' contributions either. They're certainly of a similar magnitude, I believe.

I'm not particularly advocating that, although it does have an appeal, I agree. In this thread, all I'm saying is that any award giving within pretty much the lifetime of the recipient is bound to be subject to all kinds of flaws, both due to human bias and due to failure to see what will pan out and what won't. (The latter isn't so much a human failing as the simple inability to predict outcomes in complex systems.)

Yes, it's mentioned in the speech. But it's only mentioned to say that it's surrounded by controversy. Arrhenius didn't say, "He did some fine work there," he said, in effect, "He's best known for this, but a lot of people [in particular, philosophers, not physicists] think it's trash."

Compare how Arrhenius speaks (at length and in detail) about Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. Most of the speech is devoted to the photoelectric effect and explaining how it works. He didn't even definite relativity.

But not explicitly, which is the point. The original article has scientists grumbling about the citation for the current prize because they don't like the details. Same thing with Einstein's citation: they explicitly mentioned the photoelectric effect and entirely overlooked his much more significant work to the point where it's basically an intentional omission. In 1920, Einstein's name was most associated with relativity, there's no way that they didn't think about that work.

I agree, but that's the whole point, isn't it? The science prizes are no more objectively doled out than the Peace or Literature Prizes.

Yes, it did. But by itself, it had much less effect that SR did by itself. In one fell swoop, Einstein tossed out the time-honored notions of space and time, along with notions of simultaneity and constancy of measurements. People's perception of reality was literally being altered.

The photoelectric effect merely claimed that light came in packets. That's not that radical. Come to it, Plank started that revolution more than Einstein. The real changes in thinking in physics came later, after Einstein. And most of the really weird stuff, the stuff that radically changed our perception of reality, came after 1920. (Schrodinger wasn't to do his wave equation magic for six years, Heisenberg was probably not to do his stuff for nine. I'd be more exact, but I fear Werner's energy level would get too uncertain.) It's significant that Einstein never accepted where QM went after he played his role.

Yes, but QM also rests on SR in order to work. So while it's true that Einstein helped birth QM with his photoelectric effect paper, SR was fully relevant to it. And in as much as GR had been published 5 years prior (and had undergone a fairly successful test a year prior to the award), I see no reason to have acknowledged it.

Which I think makes my case: the Nobels in science have always been somewhat flawed. (Of course, you'll also have to explain how Bohr's prize the next year was any less theoretical than special relativity was. Or, come to that, how explaining the photoelectric effect was any less theoretical than explaining the Michelson-Morley experiment or the precession of Mercury's perihelion. But if you accept that they were biased against theory, then that's a flaw in their awarding process.)

Wow, that was dismissive and pretty rude. I'm going to hope it was unintentional.

You're wrong. Across the board. People do complain about Oscar decisions all the time, even when they're given to deserving recipients if it's for the wrong wrong. Lengthy rants about these abound. If you've not seen them, that's fine (and really, you're a better person for it), but please don't deny that they're out there.

Notice I never once denied that the PE wasn't deserving of the Nobel. You're completely and totally missing what I'm saying. It was worthy, but it was not his best work. It was virtually the smallest thing Einstein did. Failing to overtly applaud SR and GR, however, can easily and reasonably be seen as diminishing the prestige of the prize because it's a glaring omission.

Anyway, I'm done arguing with you. If you don't see my point now (whether you agree or not), you never will.

I think you're missing the point. The point is, the Nobel Committee has always applied a human, fallible standard to all of the prizes, even the science ones. Don't you think giving awards for their wrong work degrades the awards? It certainly has people complaining about the Oscars.

(Also, I should be clear: Einstein didn't win it solely for the Photoelectric Effect. It's just the only of his discoveries that they named. So basically, they were saying, "Here's the prize, but we're only going to acknowledge the work that challenges our ideas the least." And their wording also basically precluded giving him a second prize because it would have been redundant to give him another prize for services to theoretical physics. So there's almost no way he would ever — indeed, he was never — be recognized fore relativity.)

Einstein never did the experiment, though. He just explained the well-known, mysterious result. Just like he did with Relativity.

It's true that the Nobels were intended to go to thinks that helped mankind, but it's also true that Einstein's work (to that point) hadn't really done a lot in that direction. Nor had Bohr's (Nobel that next year). On the other hand, Relativity seemed like it might still be wrong if you were conservative with your physics and didn't trust data much.

The Nobel committee doesn't hand out the Bank of Sweden Prize for Economics. It's difficult to see how they'd then be using it to make statements.

The science Nobels have always been just as tentative and flawed as the Peace Prize. Einstein never was acknowledged for Relativity, for example. (He basically won it for the photoelectric effect work he did.) If you know many people in the sciences, you'll encounter more than a few with strong opinions about who should have gotten/shared/never received a prize.

Actually, based on follow-up stories, this is not exactly the case. It looks like non-cheaters were able to use the higher of their two scores. So
a) This only works to their advantage
b) If they did well enough on Round 1, there's not a lot of pressure or incentive to knock themselves out on Round 2.

It also appears that the story might be more involved. Students are claiming (with video, evidently) that the prof said he was writing his own exams, meaning that the test banks were not viewed as sources of questions, just the kinds of questions they should know. Whether that makes it OK or not isn't clear given what we know right now. (And may ever know, come to that.)

It sounds like these are seniors. The university has gotten most of the money it likely will from them. (Not that tuition is generally the lion's share of revenue anyway.)