John Williams points us to this article, “Designing river flows to improve food security futures in the Lower Mekong Basin,” by John Sabo et al., featured in the journal Science. Williams writes:
The article exhibits multiple forking paths, a lack of theory, and abundant jargon. It is also very carelessly written and reviewed. For example, the study analyzed the Mekong River stage (level of the water with respect to a reference point), but refers more often to the discharge (volume per time past a reference point: the relationship between the two is non-linear). It is pretty amazing that something like this got published.
Williams’s fuller comments are here.
I haven’t read through this at all, but I ran it by a colleague who knows this stuff, and my colleague agreed with Williams’s critique, so I’ll share it here.
Too bad the journal Science doesn’t have a post-publication review portal, so we have to do things in this awkward way.