Here's another paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7677819
"Tal's Formula is the Trapezoidal Rule"
A rebuttal doesn't get much blunter than that.
Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
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Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#12Just to be clear, and this might be tangential, but she is not a physician - I think she is a dietitian. I think its a fallacy to assume that only physicians publish in medical journals and there is a negligible link between over-the-top premeds and this article.
Mary M. Tai
www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/54/5/783.pdf
http://journals.lww.com/topicsinclinicalnutrition/Citation/1...
I can't access the article, so I can't make any comment on the actual methods, but I think it seems a little presumptuous to flippantly make broad strokes about a paper from a different field solely by looking at the abstract.
He does make a good point about overeager premeds (and for good reason), but this post seems to be more airing out grievences and stereotypes than an argument about education or differences between diciplines.
Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#13For my next New England Journal paper, I'm going to use a random number generator to simulate whether conditional, probabilistic health outcomes occurred or not.
I'll cycle through this thousands of times to obtain stable estimates, and then call this the Monte Carbocation method.
Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#14I often help (good) researchers with experimental design and statistical analysis of quasi-experimental data, and it's shocking how little they understand. It pains me to think how much waste there is in science at the moment because the researchers do not have the statistical or numerical background to even know what questions are possible.
Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#15I think Michael Williams (third comment) has the right idea when he says "I’m sure you can find plenty of physicists saying spectacularly naive things about medicine...". Of course OP's discovery is amusing - even alarming - but approaching it with an air of condescension won't do much to advance either field.
There's a big difference between "saying spectacularly naive things" and publishing in a supposedly respectable journal. Plus, the guy deserves an academic weggie for naming a method after himself...
At least he followed Stigler's law.
Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#16Here's another paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7677819 "Tal's Formula is the Trapezoidal Rule" A rebuttal doesn't get much blunter than that.
It's intriguing that the author's two-page rebuttal is among her 'selected publications'.
Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#17I'd laugh a lot harder when people struggle for days and then reach a half-assed piece of some algorithm that's completely well know if I hadn't been there a dozen times myself.
Programmers are especially vulnerable to this. Who hasn't made a 4 page case statement when 3 lines of recursion would have done it, especially when starting out? Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself.
No matter how brilliant one is, its ridiculously hard to know what you don't know. In fact, sometimes being very advanced in one field makes it doubly hard to think of in one you're poor in.
Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#18I think Michael Williams (third comment) has the right idea when he says "I’m sure you can find plenty of physicists saying spectacularly naive things about medicine...". Of course OP's discovery is amusing - even alarming - but approaching it with an air of condescension won't do much to advance either field.
There's a big difference between "saying spectacularly naive things" and publishing in a supposedly respectable journal. Plus, the guy deserves an academic weggie for naming a method after himself...
"He" is a she
Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#19Peer-review failed here. It might be forgivable that a medical researcher doesn't know Calculus (maybe..), but if an article is making a mathematical claim, the journal should find appropriate reviewers. And this is not even remotely advanced math.
Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
#20I'd laugh a lot harder when people struggle for days and then reach a half-assed piece of some algorithm that's completely well know if I hadn't been there a dozen times myself. Programmers are especially vulnerable to this. Who hasn't made a 4 page case statement when 3 lines of recursion would have done it, especially when starting out? Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself. No matter how bri…
Sure, it's completely fair. We all reinvent the wheel sometimes.
That hilarious part is that this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal---and none of the reviewers realized that he'd rediscovered some 17th century math.