Mike, the quality of a paper is not determined by its significance. That a paper finds a statistically significant finding erroneously does not make the paper itself bovine manure, nor does a marginally non-significant finding on an issue later determined to be a real effect (resolving power aside) make it bovine manure.

The quality of the paper often has little or nothing to do with the statistical power of the results.

On top of that, statistical significance is _not_ a precursor to publishing results. It is appalling publication bias to only allow positive papers into publication.

I suspect in both cases it was just a poor choice of wording, but it made my eye twitch enough that I had to comment

Yes of course, sorry.

I was of course not at all meaning that the paper was published without proper justification, not that the paper was bovine manure, just that its truth value was. Or more precisely, that this was almost certainly so for some of them. But we can't know which. They are all equal in that regard.

Similarly we can't tell if what is experienced as a slump is a slump or pure chance.

...master Wang Yang interrupted the analysis and gave a very long speech that I'd like to summarize for you. He said our actual knowledge of Go and our reading skills are considerably good, but we all have a big problem concerning risk management and controlling ourselves during a game. That was quite an eye-opener for me, because while in theory I know about the following concepts, I wasn't aware how bad I actually am when it comes to practice. The first and most important lesson is: Always keep calm. People are very emotional, and especially playing this game of mind battling can cause a lot of feelings. I cannot count the number of times I lost a game in an altered emotional state. Maybe my opponent played a strange variation and I was angry about not winning easily against him now. Or I was too confident that almost any move would win this game. Or I was shocked by a good move I didn't expect, or still frustrated about an earlier mistake I made. Go is not just a game of skill. It also is a game of concentration, will power and self control. So no matter what triggers your emotions during a game, you need to try calming yourself down in order to continue playing the best Go you can. Of cause this is easier said than done and takes a lot of practice - even pro players are not immune to emotions. But they are better at controlling them, and top players like e.g. Lee Changho excel at this. As with almost everything, awareness is the first step on the path of improvement. So please think for yourself about how emotions affect your Go. Don't beat yourself up for having lost by a big blunder against a weak opponent who just wouldn't resign, but instead consider that the reason for your defeat might have been a lack of emotion control, which is a very difficult thing. Try to work on controlling your state of mind, and you will find yourself winning many more games than before.

Chances are Yi Ch'ang-Ho didn't even write the book.

In any case I think it is aprapoe given Yi Ch'ang-Ho's years of slump, maybe if he were a little more emotionally balanced, he would still be at the top of his game.

In a couple more years he will be unbalanced enough to start trolling message boards.