colnago62

My understanding is that a study is done and published. Others then repeat the study. If the findings are same/similar, then it adds weight to the accuracy of the first study. The more the study and its findings are replicated, the
more likely the conclusions are accurate.

Maelochs

A scientist get s an idea. He shops it around to corporate sponsors, universities, anyone who might benefit---in this case, maybe sponsors of World Tour teams.

Then, once done .... nobody cares. Sure, science is all about repeating experiments, duplicating the conditions to test whether the same results ensue ... but there is no money in that.

redlude97

just because you dont care doesnt mean nobody cares. Scientists in a lab testing on a small number of participants are the ones who discovered the synergistic parallel uptake pathways allowing the consumption of 90g of combined glucose/fructose that led to the development of SiS beta fuel that greatly contributed to froome winning the Giro last year.

Maelochs

Excellent job of not understanding.

The research which led to the magic fuel you reference, was funded not by those scientists, slaving away in their basements on their own dollars, striving to advance science. They sold the idea of the research to Sky, or UCI, or some other wealthy interest group (maybe a sports nutrition conglomerate, or maybe Nestle) which entity funded their research.

Maybe if you had read what I posted you would have seen this:

An astute observer—a scientific type—would have noticed that nowhere in there did I say one word about what I cared about—I talked about Funding.

Great job of building a straw man and knocking it down though. Well done.

redlude97

you said once the science is done nobody cares, yet I gave an example of a scientific idea that was repeated by other scientists and resulted in a practical application followed by the development of a product to sell to the public, all based on small initial experiments. So there are people that care about good ideas tested and repeated that answer a useful question.

wphamilton

If redlude97 is talking about this one https://www.researchgate.net/publica...sed_rat_livers One of the authors, J.H. Youn's has a list of publications here https://www.researchgate.net/scienti...51347_J_H_Youn showing that he's apparently working for USC and to me it looks like he's fairly prolific in his research in physiology and bio-chem. There isn't anything in the above paper indicating that the research was commissioned by a bike racing team, and if that's what the argument is about someone owes him an apology.

PepeM

PepeM

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants AM 27619 and AM 29867 as well as funding from the University of Southern California Faculty Innovation Fund

State funded, like the vast majority of research is.

Maelochs

So ... he is doing work on the government's tab. As I said, i was talking about funding, not whether I cared about the research.

EDIT: Looking back, it seems that what i said was that people were not going back to duplicate the research once it had been bought and paid for. Who has duplicated the study in question ... and who paid for it?

wphamilton

Here is a list of research related to the 2005 study that I linked to earlier https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?...m_uid=15503124. Look through them. Also the OP study validated the "Cadence and performance in elite cyclists" in some respects, mainly extending the parameters to more closely resemble, in their opinion, the type of activity that road racers face.

SHBR

Erzulis Boat 

Hahaha! Please tell me that you are joking about this.

Sy Reene

Y'all realize that even if there is not external funding available at research (eg. Universities) facilities, the profits brought in through patents filed by these facilities is enormous.
Related.. note Gatorade made the list :-)

PepeM

Not sure what your point is.

There seemed to be a couple of suggestions flying about (please correct me if I am wrong). One was that scientists never do anything useful. The other was that scientists are all unethical and only find results that fit the desires of their corporate sponsors.

The fact that research leads to patents that lead to profit contradicts the first statement. The fact that the vast majority of research (including most [all?] of the articles that have been posted here and most [all?] of the projects on your table) is state funded contradicts the second one.

Sy Reene

My only point was that generally all funding provided, even if by "states", you want to consider state universities a branch of the state, has an expected return. Corporate sponsorship vs State sponsorship just shifts the beneficiary from the private sector to the public sector. The monies returned by research are hoped to outweigh the costs of that research. And, while individuals may enter science as a field because they are interested in the subject and may have an altruistic goal in mind, would not be granted the ability to do any research without there being a perceived benefit back to the investors in that research.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this paradigm, but they're not the general rule.

colnago62

Maelochs

I would have hoped that some (including @PepeM) would have been able to decipher that complex ironies involved in the first statement.

It’s not as if we are all communicating on some sort of communications science development (the interwebz, or something---I am not good at that sciency stuff.)

As for the second---yeah, good science. That’s hwo science works----find a few specific bits of info which support an a priori conclusion and claim that those few bits support the general statement.

I maintain still that Most science nowadays is preliminary research---not follow-ups done to test other people’s studies. The fact that scientists somehow sometimes seem to produce results which sustain their sponsors’ needs, and bury results which don’t--- (Nobody here heard of Vioxx, I guess)---well, no one here will be arguing with Richard Feynman. He did a little science, and wrote a little about how science was too often done to please the grant providers.

The fact that some science was funded by universities (less need to provide profit) proves nothingby itself. Universities however, can also get grants---from companies which want specific research done.

The fact that some of that research provided profits, in fact, bolsters my point. How did those universities get the funding for sustained research? Who provided the grant money?

GatorAde was the brainstorm of a University of Florida football coach who saw his players falling out after practicing in 90-degree heat at 90 percent humidity. The more water they drank, the more they vomited back up.

The school did the research—even then college football was a super-high-dollar business. Winning was worth the money spent.

The product initially tasted terrible but worked. Quaker Mills (later purchased by Pepsico) bought up the patents and recipes, made the drink potable and popular, and made a fortune, and also created an industry.

They also started the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, which spends a lot of money giving grants to colleges to prove that Gatorade Is The Best. (https://www.tcu360.com/story/sports-...arch-12289586/)

Stacy Simms, and Alan Lim, who developed Skratch and Osmo sports drinks while working for the Garmin cycling team, found that GatorAde really sucked.

There was too much sugar, necessary to make the drink popular, but the sugar needed to be digested which took blood from the lungs and muscles. Carbs in the stomach kept water in the stomach also (“carbo bloat” is not unfamiliar to most folks who have used sports drinks) which meant that although the body was taking in water in the GatorAde, the body was getting less water to use to replenish losses.

Diluting sports drink to cut the sugar made the amount of mineral salts to low to be useful. But—a true “sports drink” which was designed purely to fuel an athlete with no consideration for marketing … wasn’t marketable. People wanted the sweetness and the flavors.

And somehow the Gatorade Sports Science Institute keeps finding that GatorAde is the perfect sports drink. Funny though----all those “GatorAde” marked drink bottles the NFL uses is prominently on TV every weekend contain water, because players couldn’t play if they drank that much GatorAde.

The Gatorade Sports Science Institute has not yet published that research.

“What we learned about sports drink research is that it’s a great example of scientific conflicts of interest – situations in which researchers are significantly dependent on an industry with vested interests to fund their research. Of course, the mere fact of receiving industry funding doesn’t necessarily mean a researcher will report biased findings. Yet an important review (1) found that studies conducted by industry-funded researchers were 7.6 times more likely to find no link between sugary drinks and obesity than studies without industry ties.

"Our review of the evidence on sports drinks suggests that many assumptions have been derived from industry-funded research. Strong, unbiased evidence is generally lacking. One review paper, in fact, found that research showing that rehydrating with water is fine under normal circumstance, had been suppressed.(2)

"One of the most comprehensive reviews of sports drinks studies looked at whether these products made any difference in athletic performance for regular exercisers working out under normal circumstances.(3) About half of the studies found that sports drinks made absolutely no difference in athletic performance and the other half suggested they might. In other words, the review concluded with a big “we don’t know” if sports drinks make any difference."
SOURCES
[1]Lesser, L.I., Ebbeling, C.B., Goozner, M., Wypij, D., & Ludwig, D.S. (2007, January 9). Relationship between Funding Source and Conclusion among Nutrition-Related Scientific Articles. . PLoS Medicine . doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040005
[2]Cohen, D. (2012). The truth about sports drinks. BMJ , 1-10. doi:345.e4737
[3]Colombani, P.C., Mannhart, C.., & Mettler, S.. (2013, December). Carbohydrates and exercise performance in non-fasted athletes: A systematic review of studies mimicking real-life.. Nutr J , 16.
(SugarScience.UCSF.edu | The Science on Sports Drinks)

Just one example. People can think what they want. But don’t take Vioxx, even though studies show it is harmless.

This is pretty far off course. And not doing anyone much good that I can see. if everyone else is convinced that there is all kinds of pure science being doen everywhere, and people are doing follow-ups of all of the research out there ... I am okay with that.

Wash your Vioxx down with GatorAde.

PepeM

I wouldn't call it preliminary, but you are right that very, very few replication attempts are made, and those tend to not go as well as we would hope.

Universities fund very little research themselves. The vast majority of funding comes from external grants. Most of it doesn't come from companies though, it comes from NSF, DOE, NIH, etc. Not that privately funded research doesn't exist, it very much does.

See above.

Pure science IS being done everywhere. The NSF funds ~10,000 proposals every year, all of them for fundamental research. Not everyone is doing follow-ups though. In fact, hardly anyone is. Most people agree that is an issue, but the incentives are not set up to encourage people to do so, unfortunately.

Stuff like that is out there, no way around it. Fortunately, other scientists are out there to set the record straight, which is where you found your link in the first place.

Fwiw, I believe that most bad science is just bad science, not evil science. Although some of the latter does exist.

Science reporting though, talk about a field that manages to get it wrong pretty much every single time. The only reason this weird discussion even exists in the first place.

PepeM

Maelochs

@PepeM comes through. Sorry i didn't make my points more clearly earlier on. I pretty much agree with post #188 entirely. Post #119 is the embarrassing truth, too ... I see way too much of it.

PepeM

Agreement on the internetz? Unpossible!

See you later, need to go do my low cadence intervals. Under 60 rpms for me from now on.

canklecat

Terrorists plan to weaponize A.
FEMA trailers labeled 'A' spotted outside major metropolitan areas.
Homeopaths recommend extra A intake to build immunity.
Guy nicknamed 'Avocado' markets B-pollen to offset A.
Cyclists worry B causes brittle bones, A causes bikes to Asplode. Cadences outside human natural resonant frequency of 62-68 Hz hurts.

redlude97

A pretty good summary of the current research and reasoning https://road.cc/content/feature/256654-cadence-just-how-fast-should-you-pedal

wphamilton

And yet, the greatest benefit of high cadence to amateur road cyclists hasn't been mentioned. Because very few drivers are able to judge a bicycle's speed, the low cadence makes them think you're slacking while with the high cadence they think you're going as fast as you're capable of. There are some who are less likely to be antagonistic if they think that you're working hard, to not slow them down as much.

MoAlpha

One of my postdocs just sent me version 2 of a manuscript describing a full-on replication of a study and, better yet, reproduction of the result. I actually think it's the first time in a 30-year career that I've done that. Of course, it was a spin-off from something more glamorous and we added our own additional analyses and made things a little more stringent in the hope of easier publication.