I refer to umbrellagate.
First the idiot mouthbreathing knuckledraggers were delighting in the notion that Obama "had" to have someone else hold an umbrella over him. Complete with anecdata showing other Presidents holding their own umbrellas.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/213787/ap-photographer-has-chronicled-several-presidents-umbrella-problems/

I concluded this morning that it is really rather remarkable, and a testament to basic American decency, that despite all their machinations the Republicans have not been able to produce the rampant, postapocalyptic movie fantasy USA that they seem to desire for some reason.

Feel free to expand upon your opinion of someone raised in the US to adulthood who is unfamiliar with this phrasing.

UPDATE:
Followup poll

mostly because of the corrosive effect they have on science and scientists.

In this we agree. He also posted "Sick of Impact Factors" and this bit focused on UK scholarly assessment. I enjoy his description of the arguments for why the Journal Impact Factor is leading to incorrect inferences and why it has a detrimental impact on the furthering of scientific knowledge.

But he pulled an academic nose sniffer / theological wackaloon move that I cannot support.

I was asked by a well-known university in North America to help assess the promotion application of one of their junior faculty. This was someone whose work I knew — and thought well of — so I was happy to agree. However, when the paperwork arrived I was disappointed to read the following statement the description of their evaluation procedures:

“Some faculty prefer to publish less frequently and publish in higher impact journals. For this reason, the Adjudicating Committee will consider the quality of the journals in which the Candidate has published and give greater weight to papers published in first rate journals.”

He then, admirably, tried to get them to waver on their JIF criterion....but to no avail

The reply was curt — they respected my decision for declining. And that was it.
I feel bad that I was unable to participate. I certainly wouldn’t want my actions to harm the career opportunities of another but could no longer bring myself to play the game. Others may feel differently.

So by refusing to play, he has removed himself as a guaranteed advocate for change. By drawing a hard, nose-sniffing line in the sand that he refuses to play if the game doesn't change.

I prefer a more practical approach to all of this. I think I've alluded to this in the past.

I certainly agree to review manuscripts for journals where they are overtly concerned with "impact and importance" and the maintenance of their Journal Impact Factor. Certainly. And no, I do not ignore their obvious goals. I try to give the editor in question some indication of where I see the impact and importance and whether it deserves acceptance at their high falutin' journal.

But I use my standards. I do not just roll over for what I see as the more corrosive aspects of Glamour Chasing. I rarely demand more experiments, I do not throw up ridiculous chaff about "mechanism" and other completely subjective bullshit and I do not demand optogenetics as the threshold for being interesting.

Stephen Curry could have very well done the same for this tenure review. He could have emphasized his own judgement of the impact and importance of the science and left the JIF bean counting to other reviewers. He could have struck a blow in support of the full and comprehensive review of the actual meat of this poor young faculty members' contributions. Instead, he simply left the field, after sending up an impotent protest flag.

I think that is sacrificing actual progress on ones goals for the fine feeling of chest thumping purity. And that is a mistake.

Lots of cheerleading and nice talk. Can they back it up in the actual budget fight?

So this linked set of slides describes analysis of the DP1 award mechanism. Said DP1 was created to "address concerns that high risk, visionary research was not being supported due to the conservative nature of existing NIH funding mechanisms". So, instead of gee, I dunno, FIXING this problem they did what they always do and created a new mechanism.

It was supposed to be creating review:

Based on the premise that “Person Based” application and review processes would reward past creativity and encourage innovators to go in new directions

The DP1 was open to all career stages and took a 5 page essay to describe how awesome and visionary you are. There was no requirement to submit a budget and the awards were for $500k direct costs for 5 years.

This analysis compares the DP1 awardees 2004-2006 with 1) matched R01s (on PI stage and background, topic, local institution, same time frame. combined budget was 50% of the DP1 Pioneers) 2) Random all-NIH portfolios of same total costs (but not matched on other PI characteristics), 3) HHMI investigators from 2005 competition ($600K direct costs, reappointment rate is 80% after 5 yrs and HHMI averages 15 yrs duration total) and 4) the DP1 applicants that weren't selected.

As you will see from the slides, there is tremendous degree of overlap in the distribution of outcome measures that they are using. Tremendous. So mean differences need to be taken with a huge dose of "yeah but all is never held completely equal". Still

1) DP1 produce the same number of publications per dollar as matched R01s, in higher Scimago ranked journals and the awards have a higher h-index rating (DM- interesting to give a grant award an h-index isn't it?). "experts assess DP1 research as having more impact and innovation".

Yeah. Big whoop. You select a group for innovation and awesomeness, take them off the cycle of grant churning by handing them a 2-3 grant award all at once (for the cost of a 5 page essay and a Biosketch, plus some big swanging reference letters) and they look incrementally better. See overlap, they aren't awesomely better. Compared with labs unselected, fighting the regular grant wars and with half the money. Color me severely underimpressed by this analysis of the DP1 program. All it does is tell us to give more people the same damn deal. One might even suggest this deal approximates the deal that many of our older colleagues had in effect for much of their careers when success rates for competing continuations from established investigators was north of 45%.

2) Now you match these Pioneers on R01 direct costs there is no difference in pubs or cites. Impact factor is higher for the Pioneers but the h-index doesn't differ. Experts assess Pioneers as higher impact and innovation.

These matched direct-costs PIs were in lower rank institutions (by some margin) and were longer past their terminal degrees. Since there was no matching on topic, institution or background characteristics I'm going to suggest that h-index really comes to the fore for this analysis. You simply cannot compare glamour chasing molecular eleventy labs with, say, clinical operations. There are too many differences in citation practices, GlamourHumping and what is conventionally viewed as "high impact". h-index gives us a better approximation of real impact. So meh on this analysis too.

3) HHMI folks published more papers, had more citations but not if one accounted for the direct-cost differential. HHMI folks published in higher impact journals but the h-index was the same. Experts assess the impact and innovation the same. Interestingly (to me) the HHMI folks were closer to their terminal award than the mean of the other groups. The spread was tighter, this is by design of the HHMI but I guess I was a little surprise the DP1 time-since-degree was so diverse. Institutional rankings did not differ between HHMI, DP1.

Snoooooore......

4) The only loser-finalists data reported was on the Institution rankings and the time-since-degree which didn't differ from the successful DP1 awardees.

Very frustrated on this one! An absolutely critical comparison group in my view. How did these folks do? Did they get other funding? Did they suck in terms of productivity? Did they get their money anyway and compete successfully?

The overall conclusion slide nails it in the first bullet point. We really don't need to go on from:

It appears that higher funding leads to higher portfolio‐level impact.

Look, I'm not saying that other factors don't contribute. But this is an "all else held equal" analysis. Or an attempt at it. If you match the PIs on their approximate fields, type of work, background, local institutions, etc and give them the same amount of research support, they do the same. Even the much-vaunted HHMI sinecure funding (at approximately 1 R21 or half a R01 greater value per year vs DP1) which can be expected to last for 15 year of programmatic support doesn't make a radical difference! Note that the DP1 doesn't come with any such guarantee of longer-term funding for the PI. S/he knows full well that they are right back in the hunt 2-3 years down the road. So I guess it is worth hammering the final bullet point:

DP1 vs HHMI: likely not attributable to flexibility of research, or riskiness of ideas, but may be due to funding level and stability, differences in PIs, or differences in areas of science.

Like I said, it appears truthy. Decreasing grant success is associated with increasing retraction rates. Makes a lot of sense. Desperate times drive the weak to desperate measures.

Of course, the huge caveat is the third factor.....time. There has been a lot more attention paid to scientific retractions lately. Nobody knows if increased retraction rates over time are being observed because fraud is up or because detection is up. It is nearly impossible to ever discover this. Since NIH grant success rates have likewise been plummeting as a function of Fiscal Year, the relationship is confounded.

The attitude “I’m happy to debate” should be replaced with “I’m happy to explain”.

and there it is.

According to the LA Times, Malaysia has culled 97,000 cynomolgous macaques. Last year. The article claims they culled 88,000 of them in the previous year.

The cynomolgous macaque, btw, is a very commonly used species in research laboratories in the US. From Speaking of Research we learn that in 2010 there were about 73,317 nonhuman primates used in 2010. Of all species. This is out of an estimated 25 million vertebrate animals used in research for that year. And remember, for the longer-lived species such as dogs or nonhuman primates, the vast majority of studies use them across multi-year and even multi-decade intervals. So across time the comparison of the yearly use of, say dogs versus mice, tends to overestimate the dogs on a per-individual basis.

We are incredibly parsimonious with the approximately 1% of animals used in research that are cats, dogs or monkeys, the ones usually of greatest concern to the average person. Parsimonious with all of them, in reality. As the Speaking of Research page puts it.

Let us put the number of animals used in perspective. Scientists in the US use approximately 26 million animals in research, of which only around 1 million are not rats/mice/birds/fish. We use fewer animals in research than the number of ducks eaten per year in this country. We consume over 1800 times the number of pigs than the number used in research. We eat over 340 chickens for each animal used in a research facility, and almost 9,000 chickens for every animal used in research covered by the Animal Welfare Act. For every animal used in research, it is estimated that 14 more are killed on our roads.

Malaysia just euthanized (how we don't know but I'm pretty sure IACUC oversight wasn't involved) 185,000 monkeys in the past two years. Why?

Tourists and many Malaysians gather near jungle edges to watch the monkeys, snap photos of them and feed them peanuts and bananas. But the wildlife department, also known as Perhilitan, says the extensive culling was necessary to curb a “pest species” that breeds prolifically, adapts with ease, and ransacks homes for food.

“It is a hard decision, but in order to safeguard the well-being of people and to maintain a stable macaques population … it might be the best option in a short run,” the department said in an email to The Times.

185,000 culled as annoying pests over two years. A problem that may or may not have been increased by tourists. Even if the above stats reflected different individuals in each year, this is about equivalent to the total number of nonhuman primates used in US research laboratories. In fact, the number is likely to be much closer to the annual 73,317 count, given the longevity of the species. And we have no idea when Malaysia will stop culling.

In a related vein the ASPCA says that about 3-4 million companion animals (dogs and cats) are euthanized in shelters in the US annually. Annually. Why? Because nobody wants them. 64,930 dogs and 21,578 cats used in research in 2010. Versus 3-4 million. That's 3,000,000 vs 86,508. Mere inconvenience and irresponsibility versus the advance of knowledge and creation of new medical treatment for humans and animals as well.

The inadvertent deaths of a handful to perhaps a score of monkeys[ETA 4, see first comment] at the NENPRC led to massive shut down of research, a two year reorganization process and ultimately the demise of the Center. The center which made demonstrable advances in AIDS, drug abuse and Parkinson's disease amongst other accomplishments.

At the very least this should give some perspective on how seriously the research enterprise and oversight system takes the humane treatment of research animals. It compares very favorably indeed with how the rest of the world (including the US) treats animals (yes, including companion species).