Yes - that's the hypothesis, but the evidence to support it doesn't come from an observed correlation between trees and health, as previous people have said that would be confounded will all kinds of other factors which would be impossible to measure. The evidence comes from the observed correlation between the pest and health, which is presumably (and this is big assumption) not confounded with other factors, with the presence of trees as the only possible mediating factor.

There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees. The claim is that health is correlated with the presence of something that kills the trees, effectively at random (or at least in a way which is uncorrelated with anything that also directly affects human health) making this quite a neat natural experiment. Your arguments about other confounding factors don't hold in this case. look up natural experiments or instrumental variables if you want to know more about the method.

I remember just after I moved to Norwich a bus driver refusing to understand what I meant when I said 'town'. Its a city! And a fine one at that.

I'm reading Slashdot! And I used to be a mathematician back when you had to submit papers to journals by mail.

Most charity funders refuse to pay these - also the Medical Research Council as of this year stopped people putting open access fees explicitly into budgets (even though they mandate open access). The universities have to find the money themselves.

Medicine. I agree it's less open that many disciplines. Like I said, I think open access is generally a good thing. But in my vast experience, people actually doing research genuinely don't care, as they know that people at other universities will be able to read their work whether its open or not.

As an aside - a lot of universities are rejecting the 'Gold' open access standard (the author pays version) because it is horrendously expensive for authors (usually 1000-2000 per article). They are instead preferring the 'Green' open access model, where the journal keeps the copyright to the final copyedited version, but lets researchers distribute their own version on a personal or institutional website. This is probably the way of the future because we can't keep paying stupidly high open access publishing fees.

Well of course. As I said its about impact factor. If and when open access journals get decent impact factors, researchers will be more inclined to use them.

Well it is anecdotal, but I've been in literally hundreds of 'which journal should I send my paper to' discussions (I've been doing this a long time), and the factors that come up are (in this order) (1) impact factor (2) readership, ie which society is the journal affiliated with (3) likely success (4) cost of publication. Nobody has ever once said to me "I want to send to journal X because they are open access".

I think most would agree in principle that open access is a good thing, but when it comes to having your work seen, read and acknowledged by the right people it completely goes out the window. This is medical research btw, different fields may differ.

Researchers don't generally care about their papers being open access or not. They use open access journals because they are easy to get published in (they are mostly 'author pays' publications with very low standards) or because their funder mandates it.

Humans get old which is extremely unusual in nature.

It would have been enough for the subject's family to have posted the genealogy information - the subject may have known nothing about it. Still, you are right its not the fault of the researchers (as its impossible to fully anonymise a dataset while retaining its research usefulness).

Works out pretty well for the tobacco industry.

I'd also like to judge people on their ability to think, to listen to others, research existing knowledge, to appraise and weight up ideas, and this is a large part of what college teaches. This goes beyond 'knowing stuff' and 'people skills' (although these are undoubtedly important).

Somewhere there is an astronomer with his telescope the wrong way around trying to work out the orbital trajectories of the remnants of his lunch.