As a layman (please humour me, I realise this could be a daft question) is failure to report results generally a sign of anything relating to the outcome, or is it equally likely to be something mundane?
Not a daft question at all. There're probably a range of factors.
From Ben Goldacre's paper[0] pharma industry sponsors are more likely to be compliant than non-industry sponsors, and sponsors of large trials more likely to be compliant than sponsors of small trials. This may suggest that it's partly a matter of human resource to actually compile the data and report it onto the public websites in question. Here, I'd also consider Hanlon's razor - busy people with other priorities, rather than nefarious hiding of important study data.
One point to recognise is these analyses (there are several sub-sites running [1]) explore reporting of the study results onto specific public-domain databases, per FDAAA (or other) requirements. However, it's possible that results may be reported via other routes (poster or presentations at congresses, or publications in journals) - and this might be driven more by positive results than negative. I don't think the study methodology would catch examples which had been publicly reported, but via the wrong route. (These cases would still obviously be non-compliant, but maybe less of a shade of grey?)
Also as a layman, my understanding is that simply having only "interesting" results skews the conclusions that can be drawn by meta-analyses. When you look at a bunch of studies and try to learn something from them, you need the inconclusive and negative ones to be included, in order to learn valid things.
By omitting inconclusive or negative results from publication, the whole of science is misled.
In addition to the reasons listed by other commenters, my feeling that it is also just a matter of the trial results being delayed.
This can happen for a number of reasons.
* Insufficient patients are not willing to consent to enroll in the trial. This is usually solved simply by extending the duration of the study
* Doctors are to busy to obtain informed consent from patients, and take the easier path of not mentioning that they qualify for a trial. This happens often in hospitals that join a trial but are not directly research oriented.
* Delay in the data-collection, statistical analysis or interpretation of the results. As in other fields, statisticians are constantly kept busy, and often change profession. Lack of personnel can delay the result of the trial.
I get that you were being deliberately a wee bit provocative, but If you honestly believed that of every manager you had, you would have been a horrible co-worker.
And if the system works sans-ethics, is that a problem beyond moralistic gatekeeping?
Since the main objection in the article was the military coopting the practice - The basic tenants of mindfulness, as I understand them, are not anybody's property - no matter how compelling the publisher's advances are.
And let's be honest with ourselves - the stationary and toilet paper the military buy have the implicit eventual aim of making them better at making things dead. I'm not convinced mindfulness training for troops is the problem here.
Sure, there are rogue teachers, but that has applied to everything from spurious gurus through to homebrew religions. At trial of sounding callous, caveat emptor surely?
Nothing Mindfulness (as a brand) teaches is a super-secret arcane mystery fercryinoutloud! If nothing else, the government spending time and money on it can only do wonders to validate it and cement it in the public conscious.
Doesn't matter, I suspect - It works within the narrative and implies they have something to hide. It's good /tabloid/ journalism, and poor investigative journalism.
Historically if you wait multiple days / weeks to give them a chance to reply they just do an end-run and publish puff pieces in major outlets to try and defuse your article. There are multiple cases of this in the past year.
It's either investigative journalism or it's not. How long you wait for comment has nothing to do with that. Do you really think this is equivalent to tabloids posting faked photos of some movie star's belly?
How long did they wait before publishing? We don't know, it doesn't matter. Simply stating that they didn't respond had the desired effect, and - as you rightly pointed out - does nothing to diffuse the story. The implication of the story being that not only are Google potentially taking advantage of vulnerable people to further their unspoken, morally grey agenda, but it may also have a racially questionable angle.
Alternately, they wanted to train their facial recognition dataset with certain characteristics on the cheap.
That in itself is interesting, but probably wouldn't get as many clicks. It's bottom drawer "I leave you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions" stuff.
Yes, and in a prisoners' dilemma with thousands of players, someone is surely going to defect and sell their stuff cheaper to undercut the competition. I don't think I've ever heard about large scale collusion to fix prices in food industry, and I won't hold my breath for it this time.
I think their point is simply that "it's their store" - and to be brutally honest, I agree.
Two not-entirely-random examples of similar behaviour:
Supermarkets place their own brand merchandise where they feel it'll sell best. Undeniably good business, and certainly no reason for concern.
Perhaps more questionably, but bare with me - Google place AMP content, which is to say content they have made their product by merit of some ToS/caching slight of hand, front and center. Is it exactly the same as what Amazon are doing? Well, no. Is it placing content they want consumed above other content irrespective of merit or consumer benefit? Probably.
Similarly Amazon are doing what businesses do and promoting their most profitable products, straddling both the above examples. Whether it's best for the customers is open to debate, but it doesn't change that it's entirety their prerogative.
Yeah, the search vs shop tension is the big question.
The difference being that Google are ostensibly a search engine, who are looking to monetize and leverage their ubiquity - Amazon are a book store grown to titanic proportions looking to maximize profits.
The same, but different.
I fully support Amazon's divergent empire being broken up into sperate companies, but for the moment Amazon.com - the online marketplace - is still an internet shopfront.
Realistically for companies rolling their own managers, it should be a gradual multi-year process.
Initially mentoring less experienced developers, then into running a small team, scaling up the managerial aspects and learning to let go of the code, hire great people and trust them to deliver over time.
The modern industry moves faster than that, new roles are machine gunned into our inboxes, we are told you can't stand still or you're hurting your own career.
Those aren't mutually exclusive situations, but it's certainly made more difficult by their orthogonality.
