2,865 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2020
    1. 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. 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. High-level bodies such as the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the European Commission have called for science to become more open and endorsed a set of data-management standards known as the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles.
    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...

  2. www.projectinfolit.org www.projectinfolit.org
    1. Major Findings (2:35 minutes)

      I'm quite taken with the variety of means this study is using to communicate its findings. There are blogposts, tweets/social posts, a website, executive summaries, the full paper, and even a short video! I wish more studies went to these lengths.

    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. The plan is to use the site to share surveys, interviews, and researcher notes.

      Note to self: I need to keep documenting examples of these open labs, open notebooks, etc. in the open science area.


      [also on boffosocko.com]

    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. Science and Complexity (Weaver 1948); explained the three eras that according to him defined the history of science. These were the era of simplicity, disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. In the eyes of Weaver what separated these three eras was the development of mathematical tools allowing scholars to describe systems of increasing complexity.
    3. 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.

    4. heterogeneous networks have been found to be effective promoters of the evolution of cooperation, since there are advantages to being a cooperator when you are a hub, and hubs tend to stabilize networks in equilibriums where levels of cooperation are high (Ohtsuki et al. 2006), (Pacheco et al. 2006), (Lieberman et al. 2005), (Santos and Pacheco 2005).
    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. His weak-tie networks had been politically activated

      This makes me wonder if she's cited Mark Granovetter or any of similar sociologists yet?

      Apparently she did in footnote 32 in chapter 1. Ha!

    2. 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.

    1. A statistician is the exact same thing as a data scientist or machine learning researcher with the differences that there are qualifications needed to be a statistician, and that we are snarkier.
    1. Science experiments for kids, delivered to your door

      Neat idea for when the kids are a bit older. Science delivered.

  3. Sep 2020
    1. “Oh, what heathen advice!” I thought to myself. “In this Christian country, what heathen advice!”

      This made me chuckle a bit. Collins challenges the tension between religion and science here. It's worth noting how it is during the Victorian period that England's Christianity was put to the test the most because of famous science figures of its time like Darwin.

    1. natural sciences

      The definition for natural science are fields related to that of the physical side of the world and how it runs. This being said; wouldn't Sociology be considered up there as a Natural Science? It is the study of Social patterns which can be physical trends that influence some outcomes/events in which the world works.

    1. Hennessy, E. A., Acabchuk, R., Arnold, P. A., Dunn, A. G., Foo, Y. Z., Johnson, B. T., Geange, S. R., Haddaway, N. R., Nakagawa, S., Mapanga, W., Mengersen, K., Page, M. J., Sánchez-Tójar, A., Welch, V., & McGuinness, L. A. (2020). Ensuring Prevention Science Research is Synthesis-Ready for Immediate and Lasting Scientific Impact [Preprint]. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/ptg9j

    1. the science wars,” a fierce contest between theoretical physicists and the humanists they felt were making much ado about insuf-ficiently understood advances in science,

      Les science wars (littéralement guerres de la science) réfèrent à une série d'échanges entre des tenants du réalisme scientifique et du postmodernisme concernant la nature de la méthode scientifique. Ces échanges se sont grandement tenus lors des années 1990 dans des publications académiques et populaires américaines. [...] Les réalistes ont critiqué les approches de disciplines telles les Cultural Studies, l'anthropologie culturelle, les études féministes, la littérature comparée, la sociologie des médias et les études des sciences et technologies. Ils ont également affirmé que les critiques postmodernistes ne savent pas de quoi ils parlent (Wikipédia, « Science wars », consulté le 23 septembre 2020).

    1. ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: “having spent a few days looking at ‘debate’ about COVID policy on lay twitter (not the conspiracy stuff, just the ‘we should all be Sweden’ discussions), the single most jarring (and worrying) thing I noticed is that posters seem completely undeterred by self contradiction 1/3” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2020, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1308340430170456064

    1. “It’s this sort of infinitely flexible philosophy where, regardless of what anyone said was true about physics, they could then assert, ‘Oh, yeah, you could graft something like that onto our model,’”

      in a way, sounds like astrology

    2. 448-page preprint paper

      how can he expect people to read that with scrutiny?

    1. Had it not been for the attentiveness of one person who went beyond the task of classifying galaxies into predetermined categories and was able to communicate this to the researchers via the online forum, what turned out to be important new phenomena might have gone undiscovered.

      Sometimes our attempts to improve data quality in citizen science projects can actually work against us. Pre-determined categories and strict regulations could prevent the reporting of important outliers.

    1. However, very little has been published in the academic literature about the factors that influence people to take part in citizen science projects and why participants continue their involvement, or not.

      What do we know so far? Where are clear areas where research can be done to improve our understanding of this?

    1. A training session was not carried out by the authors for the Asian Longhorned Beetle Swimming Pool Survey, a project specific to New York State.

      Why was there not a training session for this specific project?

  4. Aug 2020
    1. Cats are strange and the scientific community at least agrees on this fact. A 2014 study wondered what the physical nature of cats was, asking the very important question: are cats solid or fluid?

      I thought cats were also found in solid, liquid and gas forms.

    1. Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the idea of natural selection independently of Charles Darwin, was an implacable opponent of the smallpox vaccine during the late 19th Century

      Being an anti-vaxxer makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

      Fixing any disease that could kill an individual before his/her childbearing age is only helping weaknesses (diseases) propagate in the human populous.

    2. If a prominent magazine like The Lancet is publishing such rubbish, who is to say smaller and less well financed magazines aren’t doing the same on a langer scale?

    1. Cells, for example, are a central category, but there’s no definite criterion for what counts as a cell. If you attempt to find one, you rapidly bog down in a maze of exceptions. You might start with something like “a self-reproducing living unit carrying a single copy of the organism’s DNA within a membrane.” But red blood cells don’t self-reproduce and have no DNA. Mitochondria are not cells, but they self-reproduce using their own DNA within a membrane. Muscle cells have multiple nuclei, each with a separate complete copy of the DNA. Some algae have life stages in which they have no cell membranes. And so on indefinitely.8

      I'm not an expert in biology or anything, but perhaps the moral there is we should rethink this 'cell' idea? IIRC astronomers continue to talk about 'planets' even though the longer you examine the concept the more incoherent it becomes. (For an extended example, see the infamous Discourse about whether "Pluto is a planet", which led to hilarious goal post stretching where people kept trying to find a definition of 'planet' that exactly fit the traditional celestial objects we classify as planets without having to include any new ones or exclude existing ones)

      There is obviously no rule that says the categorizations we come up with for stuff when a field is young should be expected to have infinite inferential reach as that field of knowledge expands.

    1. Using esoteric equipment and methods to get some tiny bit of reality to behave according to theory is most of what you do in a science lab.

      Not quite. You use esoteric equipment and methods to get the opportunity to make an observation of some tiny bit of reality that would help you narrow down hypothesis space.

  5. Jul 2020
    1. O’Connor, D. B., Aggleton, J. P., Chakrabarti, B., Cooper, C. L., Creswell, C., Dunsmuir, S., Fiske, S. T., Gathercole, S., Gough, B., Ireland, J. L., Jones, M. V., Jowett, A., Kagan, C., Karanika‐Murray, M., Kaye, L. K., Kumari, V., Lewandowsky, S., Lightman, S., Malpass, D., … Armitage, C. J. (n.d.). Research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond: A call to action for psychological science. British Journal of Psychology, n/a(n/a), e12468. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12468