"An example of cargo cult science is an experiment that uses another researcher's results in lieu of an experimental control<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_control>. Since the other researcher's conditions might differ from those of the present experiment in unknown ways, differences in the outcome might have no relation to the independent variable<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_variable>under consideration. Other examples, given by Feynman, are from educational research <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_research>, psychology<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology>(particularly parapsychology <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology>), and physics<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics>. He also mentions other kinds of dishonesty, for example, falsely promoting one's research to secure funding."
If we all had a dime for every NLP paper we've read that used "another researcher's results in lieu of an experimental control," we wouldn't have to work for a living.
What do you think? Are we all cargo cultists in this respect?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
Kev
-- Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, PhD Biomedical Text Mining Group Lead, Computational Bioscience Program, U. Colorado School of Medicine 303-916-2417 http://compbio.ucdenver.edu/Hunter_lab/Cohen -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2070 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://mailman.uib.no/public/corpora/attachments/20140408/97415fdd/attachment.txt>