Here's something, the Lancet offers two levels of peer review, normal and expedited. There is no warning about expedited peer review papers (I've got a marketing email from the Lancet on how much faster they are willing to push through papers through review than any other journal out there) so far as I can tell. So when you read the Lancet, you don't know if you're reading something that went through traditional peer review or this expedited peer review light.

I would think that this should be a terrible reputational hit for the Lancet. So far as I can tell, it's not.

What you are describing is a bad academic program that needs to be reformed or terminated. Setting up undergrads in this sort of a bind is simply not good pedagogy.

"Science" does not have one system. The UK requires publicly funded science to give up all data on request. The US does not have this rule. Australia (from a comment above) seems to be in the process of following the UK's lead. The US should too.

Another issue is when somebody starts talking about juicing stuff in order to move the politicians along (see Stephen Schneider) that guy needs to get seriously smacked professionally. Scientists need to stay away from being propagandists. It shouldn't be tolerated.

data sharing and retention policies could use some reform. If someone wants your data to check and make sure you did the math right, you don't dance around releasing it forever, you give the data, right away.

Any objection? There are apparently a bunch of climate scientists that don't like that standard.

Here's a sensible requirement. If you submit a paper, you submit your data and sufficient information that anybody can rerun your stuff. The whole MBH 98 idiocy was largely about how climate scientists would dance around releasing their data and methods. In the UK, if you take the public's money, you can't do that. In the US you can. The US should follow the UK on this one.

You may want to look at the attempts to reign in Fannie and Freddie after the profits scandals early in the Bush years. It was Republicans, with both Bush and McCain in the lead trying to reform the housing loan market in sensible ways and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and mostly other Democrats (with a few bought and paid for Republicans) voting against it.

If you have a bit of strategic vision, you'd see how valuable a free Iraq is and will be. Israeli pretensions to automatic US support because they are the only democracy are on their last legs (if the Iraqis can keep their republic), iran is discomfited because a free Shiite nation with equal religious standing is right next door. The Saudis have already made greater progress towards sensible regime reform since we invaded Iraq than they had in the 7 decades prior. The dividends (if we don't screw it up now) are good and are going to keep on giving in the form of a detoxified muslim and arab world which dries up the crazy jihadi recruiting pool.

That's actually more valuable than Bin Laden's head on a stick.

All money bills must originate in the House. Who controls those? Democrats. Who gets to control what bills get on the floor of the Senate? The majority leader, Harry Reid, does. He's a Democrat too. All the Republicans had was a more limited veto than the President already had. A Presidential veto needs a 67 vote override in the Senate as well as 2/3rds of the House. Congressional Republicans could have been overridden by 60 votes. This is hardly control.

The problem isn't the cheating, but the tolerance for lax process in the checking system. We don't have anywhere near 1% of scientists getting caught at fraud. There's something broken with the publishing system if so many can cheat and not get caught.

Human frailty will always exist. How good you are at catching it is a significant variable that can be controlled. We aren't doing so well.

The post war Saudi Arabia adjustments on liberty and modernization provoked by the Iraq war (the Kingdom's answer to the question "if the Iraqis can vote, why can't we") likely also preserves the KSA fields under a geopolitically reasonable regime. We've paid the piper already and are just starting to reap the benefits, if we don't sabotage the current success in a snit (like Congress' refusal to give air support and fund S. Vietnam's munitions needs in 1974-5).

Without the Korean war, there might not even be a DPRK so some poor korean kid starving to death today can be laid on the Rosenberg's doorstep.

If you trust Wikipedia on controversial political matters, you're naive beyond belief. But just for fun, the Saddam launched Iran-Iraq war killed 1.3 million (using high estimates and adding both sides casualties just like the high counts do to the US in this conflict). That's twice the unbelievably high and already discredited Lancet figures. So believe Lancet or not but apples to apples please.

Did those 200 deaths include the girls that Uday Hussein make dissapear after he'd finished with them? I think not. Did those 'peacetime' deaths include the deaths from diverting medicines for the people under Saddam to regime stabilization toys like Playstations for the kids of the ruling class? Of course not. AI is lying with statistics. A lot of people are. Apples to apples please.

You don't even understand what treason is. Riddle me this, what other country would Aaron Burr have been serving were he convicted in his treason trial?

In case you didn't notice, nobody's going after the NY Times for disseminating state secrets. The only conviction lately seems to have been Scooter Libby's perjury conviction even though it was not Libby but Armitage that first blabbed about Plame.

Burr was in part acquitted because there were no two witnesses available to document his treason in court. We have a very high standard in this country against treason prosecutions (with good reason on the basis of past bad practice in England). You're going down a road that, while perfectly legal, is profoundly unamerican.

The Iraq war, if the present Iraqi republic does not devolve into a tyranny, will have destroyed Israel's claim to be the only Mid East democracy. It already has generated more productive political evolution in Saudi Arabia than 5 previous decades of US constructive engagement, and it has created a profoundly dangerous religious situation for Iran's ugly mullahs who have, in Sistani, an opponent who fundamentally thinks them heretics and who is quietly taking their theological regime apart from the inside.

Was our invasion of Iraq a bad war? Possibly. It does tend to look a bit better if you have a reasonably informed view of the benefits we are currently reaping and which I hope the current administration does not throw away.

Just finished listening to the latest econtalk podcast and they covered this very thing. The majority of the sunk cost in bringing a drug to market is in the clinical trials. You could get rid of patents on drugs by simply requiring any competing manufacturer who wanted to make the same drug to buy out the original drug company's clinical trials investment. Let's say the first company spent $800M on those trials. Somebody else wants to make the drug? No problem, pony up $400M and you now have two manufacturers. Subsequent companies also pay $400M but it gets split up among the prior license holders.

It's an ingenious way to spread the costs so drug innovation continues without patents.

If a diagnostics dongle allowed you to reset the odometer, the manufacturer would likely be violating several laws, starting with plain old fraud. Those odometers are represented and relied on as being unresettable.