Processed Food—An Experiment That Failed

Processed Food-An Experiment That Failed.

Those of us who have participated in science know that 9 of every 10 experiments are failures. Now imagine that the last 50 years has been a grand clinical research experiment, with the American population as unwitting participants, conducted by 10 principal investigators— Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Kraft, Unilever, General Mills, Nestlé, Mars, Kellogg, Proctor & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson. In 1965...

A Failed Experiment

The massive national experiment in electricity deregulation — launched by over a dozen states more than a decade ago, in the wake of the Reagan revolution — has failed on multiple counts. Intended to reduce electricity rates, deregulation instead increased rates. For the 10 months through October 2006, average rates in deregulated states were 55 percent higher than in regulated states. Volatili...

Resolving a Replication That Failed

The paper at hand aimes at identifying the assumptions that lead to the results presented in an article by Michael Macy and Yoshimichi Sato published in PNAS. In answer to a failed replication, the authors provided the source code of their model and here the results of carefully studying that code are presented. The main finding is that the simulation program implements an assumption that is mo...

Democracy: The God That Failed

Austerity: a failed experiment on the people of Europe.

Many governments in Europe, either of their own volition or at the behest of the international financial institutions, have adopted stringent austerity policies in response to the financial crisis. By contrast, the USA launched a financial stimulus. The results of these experiments are now clear: the American economy is growing and those European countries adopting austerity, including the UK, ...