AIDS/vaccine tests ; How would a pharmaceutical company tell if their vaccine worked or not?

• "the results of a handful of successful, but small, early-phase clinical trials "
• "All of the vaccines, which were developed by several small biotechnology companies, modestly but significantly reduced viral levels in the blood of patients"
•  "a placebo-controlled clinical trial" 

Nature:  "Only-children" not so lonely

• [initial observation] "t is a widely held stereotype that children who grow up without brothers or sisters may be 'oddballs' or 'misfits'"
• "a 2004 study of more than 20,000 kindergarten children in the United States..."
• [how to quantify social skills?] "analysis of responses of 13,466 middle- and high-school students from grades 7-12 who were asked to select five friends from among the students at their school. The researchers found that children without siblings are just as likely to be selected as friends by their classmates as those who grew up with brothers and sisters."
• [different studies may produce different results!]  "But the differing results from the two studies raise a number of questions"  

• See actual error bar use
• See t-test
• Identify significance 
• multiple data presentation formats (map, graph, table...) 

• sdf 

NSIDC:  Arctic Sea Ice  [how do you tell when the amount of ice cover is "different" when it is always changing?]

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Nature: BTi affects bid reproduction

  [example of misleading reporting built on solid science.]

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Nature:  The Escalator Effect  

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