Reply #21: Well, as a former "Senior Research Scientist," I'll say ...

[TahitiNut]

... no whey, hose 'A'! (Yes, that was what my business card and personnel file said.) I can't begin to count the number of times I had to resist pressure to "spin" the results of an empirical analysis for 'political' reasons. There's something in my core that abhors the twisting of objective information to make it more 'palatable.' Perhaps it's the constant effort to comprehend and grapple with the inherent "fuzz" that already exists in any objective study, and the discipline of fairly presenting that ambiguity in an honest and candid fashion. The notion that there are 'hard' results and precise findings in science is nonsense - absolutely everything has inherent "fuzz" including the numerical methods. The study of Numerical Methods itself, a core discipline in nearly all science, is the devotion to minimizing error and ambiguity resulting from the observation and measurement itself. I think even a mediocre scientist constantly grapples with eliminating his own bias. To fight against that and then pander to the bias of others seems to be ethically masochistic to me.