3,030 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2021
    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2021, January 18). Calling lawyers, historians, and political scientists. A thread on the value of life. I’m still stunned by Lord Sumption, ex-judge on UK’s Supreme Court, now anti-lockdown campaigner, publicly stating that the life of a woman with stage 4 bowel cancer was ‘less valuable’ 1/4 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1351118909886312449

    1. Psychologists, at least psychologists who write textbooks, not only show no interest in the origin and development of love or affection, but they seem to be unaware of its very existence.

      There is little to no information about love in our textbook, which leads me to believe that love is one emotion that was not historically explored.

    1. Tang, J. W., Bahnfleth, W. P., Bluyssen, P. M., Buonanno, G., Jimenez, J. L., Kurnitski, J., Li, Y., Miller, S., Sekhar, C., Morawska, L., Marr, L. C., Melikov, A. K., Nazaroff, W. W., Nielsen, P. V., Tellier, R., Wargocki, P., & Dancer, S. J. (2021). Dismantling myths on the airborne transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Journal of Hospital Infection, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhin.2020.12.022

    1. Although Haldaneobserved thatthe progress of science had been staggeringly rapid in the last hundred and forty years, he considered it, “quite as likely as not that scientific research may ultimately bestrangled in some such way as this before mankind has learned to control its own evolution.”

      Again considering Hall's Where Is My Flying Car? one could argue that this is exactly what has happened with respect to nuclear power and the original acceleration we were heading for that stalled in the 20th century.

    2. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was the son of the leading Scottish physiologist, John Scott Haldane, from whom J.B.S. learned “the fundamentals of science,”an education that began very early in his life.Throughout the younger Haldane’s youth, the pair undertook many “legendary and daring physiological experiments,”

      Another father-son pair.

    1. Instead of sharing the data and the code that produces their results, most scientists simply publish a textual description of their research in online publications.

      Science is suffering when scientist compete by uphelding their data.

    1. The non-determinism is why cache invalidation — and that other hard problem, naming things — are uniquely and intractably hard problems in computer science. Computers can perfectly solve deterministic problems. But they can’t predict when to invalidate a cache because, ultimately, we, the humans who design and build computational processes, can’t agree on when a cache needs to be invalidated.
    1. Το να πούμε, όπως λέχθηκε απ’ όσους υπέγραψαν την «Έκκληση της Χαϊλδεβέργης» (την οποία, από την πλευρά μου, μάλλον θα ονόμαζα Έκκληση της Νυρεμβέργης), ότι η επιστήμη και μόνο η επιστήμη μπορεί να λύσει όλα τα προβλήματα, είναι αποκαρδιωτικό.
    1. Π.χ. στην έκκληση της Χαϊδελβέργης, που υπέγραψαν 264 επιστήμονες, με αφορμή τη Συνδιάσκεψη για το περιβάλλον στο Ρίο ντε Ζανέιρο το 1993, υπήρχαν ανάμεσά τους και 59 νομπελίστες που απέρριπταν την οικολογία σαν μια «άλογη ιδεολογία που αντιτίθεται στην επιστημονική και βιομηχανική πρόοδο»
  2. Jan 2021
    1. Evidence synthesis, which collates, appraises, and summarises results from individual studies across an evidence base and makes them available for policy advice, is particularly well organised in the health sciences; a key role is played here by the global knowledge network Cochrane, founded in 1993 and seated in London. T
    1. Science’s culture of critique discourages groupthink, countermands the effects of human biases, and protects knowledge, not only by rewarding a dispassionate stance toward the subject and institutionalizing organized skepticism but also by fostering competition among scientists able to replicate and hence challenge each other’s work.

      Great aspirations, but how well are they actually achieved in practice/reality?

    1. ReconfigBehSci [@SciBeh] (2020-01-27) new post on Scibeh's meta-science reddit describing the new rubric for peer review of preprints aimed at broadening the pool of potential 'reviewers' so that students could provide evaluations as well! https://reddit.com/r/BehSciMeta/comments/l64y1l/reviewing_peer_review_does_the_process_need_to/ please take a look and provide feedback! Twitter. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1354456393877749763

    1. Yesterday was the day that NASA, NOAA, the Hadley Centre and Berkeley Earth delivered their final assessments for temperatures in Dec 2020, and thus their annual summaries. The headline results have received a fair bit of attention in the media (NYT, WaPo, BBC, The Guardian etc.) and the conclusion that 2020 was pretty much tied with 2016 for the warmest year in the instrumental record is robust.

      Links zur Berichterstattung in der englischsprachigen Presse. Der Artikel geht vor allem auf die Sicherheit und Unsicherheit der Angaben zur Durchschnittstemperatur ein.

    1. In our time, machine learning conference attendance and submission rates continue to compound, often outstripping the doubling of Moore's law the discipline relies on to make any forward progress. The quality of results in these and other fields since the vast expansion of their communities has not increased.

      Just wait until you see what publishers have planned for India and China

    2. Communities break down with scale, losing the vitality they had when small and ultimately becoming an undifferentiated mass with an enormous diffusion of focus, to the point that any given group of sufficient scale is not really differentiable from any other.

      Going local, again. Need a solution for scaling the commons.

  3. Dec 2020
    1. The response of the science settlers to the serious questions that have been raised about their unscientific advocacy has been to demand a more closed system, to hide more data, to urge newspapers to stop printing letters from anyone who questions Global Warming and to even propose the imprisonment of Warming critics.

      Science deniers.

    2. The science of the "Science is settled" crowd isn't an open system of skeptical inquiry, but a closed system of centralized authority funded and controlled by special interests, beholden to political agendas and intolerant of dissent. It has the same relationship to science that the various People's Democracies had to democracy.

      They try to mold our opinions so we are more amenable to their agendas.

    3. A scientist who does not utilize the scientific method is as much use as a carpenter who cannot make chairs or a plumber who cannot fix toilets. A science that exists as a fixed absolute, whose premises are not to be questioned, whose data is not to be examined and whose conclusions are not to be debated, is a pile of wood or a leaky toilet. Not the conclusion of a process, but its absence.

      Understanding science is a process.

    1. To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language Neuroscientists find that interpreting code activates a general-purpose brain network, but not language-processing centers.

      Summary of the article:

      • Understanding code is neither done by language centers, nor by mathematical centers of the brain — it’s a whole different ball game.
      • This comes from a researcher who’s studying how different cognitive functions relate to language processing parts of the brain.
      • The study involved young programmers who analysed code while their brains were scanned.
      • People either say that great coders are great at language, or great at maths - neither seems to be true, and there is no single specialized area that lights up from coding.
      • The test activated the multiple demand network in participants’ brains, a wide network for performing mentally challenging tasks.
    1. Stuaert Rtchie [@StuartJRitchie] (2020) This encapsulates the problem nicely. Sure, there’s a paper. But actually read it & what do you find? p-values mostly juuuust under .05 (a red flag) and a sample size that’s FAR less than “25m”. If you think this is in any way compelling evidence, you’ve totally been sold a pup. Twitter. Retrieved from:https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/1305963050302877697

    1. limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, developed in thefifteenth century todistinguish between“Old Christians”and those of Jewish, Muslim, orheretical origin, also shaped Iberian ideas of difference between Africansand Europeans.

      limpieza de sangre

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    Annotators

    1. with the help of new generations of innovators and explorers, these visions of the future can become a reality. As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future

      These are really beautiful and inspiring posters.

      Via @chrisaldrich

  4. Nov 2020
    1. A standard example of a non-personalized nudge involves retirement planning. An employer could (i) leave it to employees to set-up their 401K plans and decide how much to save or (ii) set up the plans by default so that a predetermined amount is saved automatically and allow employees to make adjustments. Saving by default is an architected choice that relies on two facts: first, people often fail to set up a retirement plan, which is a social problem, and second, people tend to stick with default rules. Thus, by choosing option (ii), the choice architect nudges people to start with the better position for them and society.

      The non-personalized nudge

      An employer can choose to let their employee set up their own pensions plan or set them up with a default plan and allow them to change. The second scenario is an "architected choice" that relies on two phenomena:

      1. The fact people often fail to set up a retirement plan
      2. The tendency of people to stick with default rules

      The default plan is a non-personalized nudge which (supposedly) benefits the people as well as society.

      This reminds me of Michael Malice's idea of "the people that need leaders are not able to pick good ones".

  5. Oct 2020
    1. We have increased the power of gossip-mongers and correspondingly reduced the power of elite institutions of the 20th century, including politicians, mainstream media, and scientists.

      The scaling up of the gossip mechanism on top of ISS has resulted in an increase in power for gossip mongers and a decrease in power of the institutions we relied on before: politicians, mainstream media, scientists.

    1. The ideas here make me think that being able to publish on one's own site (and potentially syndicate) and send/receive webmentions may be a very useful tool within open science. We should move toward a model of academic samizdat where researchers can publish their own work for themselves and others. Doing this will give them the credit (and job prospects, etc.) while still allowing movement forward.

    1. Whom exactly were we trusting with our care? Why did we decide to trust them in the first place? Who says that only certain kinds of people are allowed to give us the answers?

      Part of the broader cultural eschewing of science as well? Is this part of what put Trump and celebrities in charge?

    2. She reached behind her to her bookshelf, which held about a dozen blue bottles of something called Real Water, which is not stripped of “valuable electrons,” which supposedly creates free radicals something something from the body’s cells.

      I question her credibility to market claims like this. I suspect she has no staff scientist or people with the sort of background to make such claims. Even snake oil salesmen like Dr. Oz are pointedly putting us in hands way too make a buck.

    1. Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms.
    2. For instance, in the study of mobile phone networks, the frequency and length of interactions has often been used as measures of link weight (Onnela et al. 2007), (Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert 1008), (Miritello et al. 2011).

      And they probably shouldn't because typically different levels of people are making these decisions. Studio brass and producers typically have more to say about the lead roles and don't care as much about the smaller ones which are overseen by casting directors or sometimes the producers. The only person who has oversight of all of them is the director, and even then they may quit caring at some point.

    1. Scientists can find the latest data and analysis on their areas of research, determine experiments that have already been performed that they don’t need to replicate and find new opportunities for investigation

      "Don't need to replicate"!!! A big part of science is the ability to exactly replicate and double check others' work! We need the ability to do more replication, not less!

    1. People are rewarded for being productive rather than being right, for building ever upward instead of checking the foundations. These incentives allow weak studies to be published. And once enough have amassed, they create a collective perception of strength that can be hard to pierce.

      We desperately need to fix these foundations of science to focus on solid foundations and reproducibility...

  6. www.projectinfolit.org www.projectinfolit.org
    1. I n 1808, New York physician John Augustine Smith, a disciple of Charles White, r ebuked Samuel Stanhope Smith as a minister dabbling in sci-ence. “ I hold it my duty to lay before you all t he facts which are rele-vant,” J ohn Augustine Smith announced in his circulated lecture. The principal f act was t hat t he “ anatomical s tructure” of t he European was “superior” t o that of t he other races. As different species, Blacks and Whites had been “placed at t he opposite extremes of t he scale.” The polygenesis l ecture l aunched Smith’s academic career: he became edi-tor of t he Medical and Physiological Journal, t enth president of t he Col-lege of William & Mary, and president of t he New York College of Physicians and Surgeons.

      Another example of a scion in academia using racial ideas to launch his career to prominence.

      This also provides a schism for a break between science and religion which we're still heavily dealing with in American culture.

    1. Because I’m old, I still have my students set up Feedly accounts and plug in the RSS feeds of their classmates and hopefully add other blogs to their feeds as well. And like blogging, I realize only a handful will continue but I want to expose them to the power of sharing their own research/learning via blogging and how to find others who do as well via Feedly.
    1. To further assist students in reading annotated articles, individual annotations are tagged according to a particular “learning lens,” including: glossary, for key terms; previous work; author’s experiments; results and conclusions; news and policy links; connections to learning standards; and also reference and notes.

      I once remarked on the evolution of scientific journal article titles and am surprised that they don’t mention visiting popular science journalism as a means of entering some journal articles from a broader perspective before delving into a journal article itself? They don’t always exist for all articles, but for those with interesting/broad impact they can be a more immediate way into the topic before getting in to the heavier jargon of a scientific article itself.

    1. Archaeologists said Monday that they have discovered a major prehistoric monument under the earth near Stonehenge that could shed new light on the origins of the mystical stone circle in southwestern England.

      Why in God's name are they using the word "mystical" in a science article about this? It's use only serves to muddy the water and encourage fanciful speculation and further myths.

    1. the Frauchiger-Renner paper when it first appeared on arxiv.org. In that version of the paper, the authors favored the many-worlds scenario. (The latest version of the paper, which was peer reviewed and published in Nature Communications in September, takes a more agnostic stance.

      I really love it when articles about science papers actually reference and link the original papers!

    1. In a study of the Swedish Word of Life Church, he noted that members felt part of a complex gift-exchange system, giving to God and then awaiting a gift in return (either from God directly or through another church member).[66]

      This philosophy has been around long enough that there ought to be evidence that it works for more than just the leaders of the churches. If anything, it feels like the middle classes that are practicing it are practicing it right towards poverty over the past 20 years.

    1. Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was on-line, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversa-tions among people who had never been on the site.

      There's some definite connection to this to network theory of those like Stuart Kaufmann. You don't need every node to be directly connected to create a robust network, particularly when there are other layers--here interpersonal connections, cellular, etc.